Stairway to Success: An Online Floor-Aware Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation Framework via LLM-Driven Coarse-to-Fine Exploration

Understand

Deployable service and delivery robots struggle to navigate multi-floor buildings to reach object goals, as existing systems fail due to single-floor assumptions and requirements for offline, globally consistent maps.

• Multi-floor environments pose unique challenges including cross-floor transitions and vertical spatial reasoning, especially navigating unknown buildings.
• Object-Goal Navigation benchmarks like HM3D and MP3D also capture this multi-floor reality, yet current methods lack support for online, floor-aware navigation.
• To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{\textit{ASCENT}}, an online framework for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation that enables robots to operate without pre-built maps or retraining on new object categories.