Open World Navigation in Human-centric Environments | OWN 2025

Can a robot be deployed anywhere in the world, then navigate its surroundings zero-shot to reach a goal? Navigation in the open world remains an elusive grail of robotics, owing to the sheer diversity of environments, agents and scenarios a robot can encounter. With the rise of foundation models, robots have attained unprecedented levels of generalization, enabling progress toward open world navigation. Yet training data is bounded, making it almost certain robots will encounter unexpected, out-