WayTrace: A Map-to-Language-to-Trace Hierarchy for Embodied Urban Navigation

Summary

WayTrace is a hierarchical system that enables autonomous robots to follow web-map directions over long distances by converting them into language commands and visual path traces. It uses an off-the-shelf vision-language model to issue atomic commands, a trace predictor trained on over one million street-level images to draw paths, and a reinforcement learning policy for tracking. In simulations, WayTrace remains robust to GNSS noise with about ten times fewer violations than point-goal baselines, and on a wheeled-legged robot it completed real-world missions up to 1.37 km at about 1.1 m/s through urban, rural, and campus environments.

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Why it matters by industry

• Artificial intelligence

  This research directly addresses the embodied intelligence subtopic by presenting a novel hierarchical navigation system that integrates language, vision, and reinforcement learning for real-world robot deployment.