MessyNav: Zero-Shot Navigation via Manipulation in Messy Environments

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Article Summary

Real-world environments are messy, with paths often blocked by everyday objects like chairs and toys, requiring robots to perform interactive navigation by manipulating obstacles to clear a path. Existing methods rely on extensive simulation-based learning or per-scene instructions specifying which objects to avoid or manipulate. They struggle to generalize across novel objects, diverse environments, and varied contexts such as a cart of fragile glassware that should be avoided while an empty one can be pushed. We formalize this problem as open-world interactive navigation and present MessyNav, a zero-shot framework based on vision-language models (VLMs). At its core, MessyNav performs explicit VLM-based affordance reasoning before task planning to decide whether to swipe, pick up, or avoid an object and produce a high-level plan. Evaluated on a mobile manipulator across real-world indoor and outdoor environments, MessyNav improves success rate by 27 percentage points (pp) over the strongest baseline in real-robot trials and achieves statistically significant gains in a larger-scale offline evaluation, without task-specific training.

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