MORN: Metacognitive Object-Goal Regulation for Resource-Rational Long-Horizon Navigation

TL;DR

MORN introduces a metacognitive architecture for long-horizon robot navigation that dynamically balances exploration and resource constraints, improving goal completion and reducing wasted effort.

Contribution

This work presents MORN, a novel meta-controller inspired by cognitive science that enhances existing navigation systems with resource-aware decision-making.

Findings

Goal Completion Rate increased from 0.23 to 0.30.

Wasted Step Fraction reduced from 0.90 to 0.70.

MORN outperforms baseline methods on the HM3D dataset.

Abstract

Robots deployed in unstructured human environments must frequently execute long-horizon missions, such as find the mug, then the chair, then the printer, under strict operational constraints. While contemporary zero-shot Object Navigation (ObjectNav) agents leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to effectively localize semantic targets, they operate as purely reactive systems that inherently lack global resource awareness. Consequently, these agents inadvertently exhaust critical budgets, including time and battery, on infeasible subgoals due to partial observability, failing to balance local exploration with global mission viability. To bridge this gap by injecting resource-rationality into the navigation loop, we present MORN (Metacognitive Object-goal Regulation Navigation), an executive architecture inspired by Dual-Process Theory in cognitive science. MORN augments frozen navigation backbones with a System 2 meta-controller that continuously monitors the System 1 locomotor. By formalizing three neuro-cognitive states, Potentiality Index, Persistence Gating, and Evidence Accumulation, MORN dynamically regulates the mission schedule based on online estimates of progress velocity and perceptual uncertainty. This mechanism effectively neutralizes the Sunk Cost Fallacy, enabling agents to abort zombie goals early and decisively commit to achievable ones. Extensive experiments on the HM3D dataset demonstrate that MORN improves Goal Completion Rate (CR) from 0.23 to 0.30 and reduces Wasted Step Fraction (WSF) from 0.90 to 0.70, establishing that in resource-constrained autonomy, the metacognitive awareness of global resources is as critical as the reactive ability to navigate.