Walk With Me: Long-Horizon Social Navigation for Human-Centric Outdoor Assistance

TL;DR

This paper introduces Walk with Me, a map-free framework enabling robots to perform long-horizon, socially compliant outdoor navigation based on natural language instructions, leveraging vision-language models and safety reasoning.

Contribution

It presents a novel map-free approach combining semantic grounding, long-horizon planning, and safety-aware reasoning for outdoor social navigation from high-level instructions.

Findings

Successfully grounds high-level instructions into concrete destinations.

Achieves long-horizon navigation without relying on pre-built HD maps.

Handles complex situations with safety-aware decision making.

Abstract

Assisting humans in open-world outdoor environments requires robots to translate high-level natural-language intentions into safe, long-horizon, and socially compliant navigation behavior. Existing map-based methods rely on costly pre-built HD maps, while learning-based policies are mostly limited to indoor and short-horizon settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Walk with Me, a map-free framework for long-horizon social navigation from high-level human instructions. Walk with Me leverages GPS context and lightweight candidate points-of-interest from a public map API for semantic destination grounding and waypoint proposal. A High-Level Vision-Language Model grounds abstract instructions into concrete destinations and plans coarse waypoint sequences. During execution, an observation-aware routing mechanism determines whether the Low-Level Vision-Language-Action policy can handle the current situation or whether explicit safety reasoning from the High-Level VLM is needed. Routine segments are executed by the Low-Level VLA, while complex situations such as crowded crossings trigger high-level reasoning and stop-and-wait behavior when unsafe. By combining semantic intent grounding, map-free long-horizon planning, safety-aware reasoning, and low-level action generation, Walk with Me enables practical outdoor social navigation for human-centric assistance.