OpenFrontier: General Navigation with Visual-Language Grounded Frontiers

TL;DR

OpenFrontier is a versatile navigation framework that leverages visual frontiers and language priors to enable zero-shot, efficient, and adaptable robot navigation without task-specific training.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using visual frontiers as semantic anchors, eliminating the need for dense mapping or fine-tuning, and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance.

Findings

Achieves strong zero-shot navigation performance across benchmarks.

Enables real-world deployment on a mobile robot without fine-tuning.

Operates efficiently without dense 3D semantic mapping.

Abstract

Open-world navigation requires robots to make decisions in complex everyday environments while adapting to flexible task requirements. Conventional navigation approaches often rely on dense 3D reconstruction and hand-crafted goal metrics, which limits their generalization across tasks and environments. Recent advances in vision-language navigation (VLN) and vision-language-action (VLA) models enable end-to-end policies conditioned on natural language, but typically require interactive training, large-scale data collection, or task-specific fine-tuning with a mobile agent. We formulate navigation as a sparse subgoal identification and reaching problem and observe that providing visual anchoring targets for high-level semantic priors enables highly efficient goal-conditioned navigation. Based on this insight, we select visual frontiers as semantic anchors and propose OpenFrontier, a navigation framework that requires no task-specific training or fine-tuning and seamlessly integrates diverse vision-language prior models. OpenFrontier enables efficient navigation with a lightweight system design, without dense 3D semantic mapping, task-specific policy training, or model fine-tuning. We evaluate OpenFrontier across multiple navigation benchmarks and demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, as well as effective real-world deployment on a mobile robot.