Autonomous Frontier-Based Exploration with VLM Guidance
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Computer Science > Robotics
Title:Autonomous Frontier-Based Exploration with VLM Guidance
Abstract:Autonomous robotic exploration of unknown and hazardous environments, a long-standing challenge, can be significantly improved by leveraging the advanced reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce a novel exploration pipeline where a VLM performs high-level strategic decision-making, guiding a conventional low-level robotics control stack. At decision points, the robot generates a multimodal prompt with its current map and visual imagery of potential paths, or frontiers. The VLM analyzes this prompt to select the most promising frontier, replacing simple geometric heuristics with contextual spatial reasoning. This approach, validated in simulation across six indoor environments, improves map coverage by up to 24\% over existing methods. Our pipeline is lightweight, training-free, and easily transferable to any robot with standard sensors and an internet connection.
| Comments: | 8 pages, 10 figures, CVPR 2026: 2nd Workshop on 3D-LLM/VLA: Bridging Language, Vision and Action in 3D Environments |
| Subjects: | Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.23165 [cs.RO] |
| (or arXiv:2605.23165v1 [cs.RO] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.23165
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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