OWLS: Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields for Zero-Shot Rover Navigation
Chahyon Ku, Erica Tevere, Georgios Georgakis, Rudra Mukherjee, Bernadette Bucher
Semantics can provide a proxy for physical traversability. Terrain that looks like loose sand or a rock field is likely to have similar physical properties. Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) enable this physical reasoning over terrain outside any fixed label set. We present Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields (OWLS), which plans directly over the dense feature map of a VLM. Prompted with a description of traversable terrain, the VLM scores every pixel of a single camera image; OWLS projects these scores onto the ground, adapts them to the platform with two morphological operations, and uses the result as the speed field of a minimum-time planner, so terrain appearance and obstacle clearance shape one trajectory. OWLS needs no task-specific training, no terrain annotation, no persistent map, and no exteroceptive sensor beyond the camera. We evaluate it on a physical rover indoors and off-road, on simulated Mars and Moon rovers over 200 procedurally generated terrains, and on real planetary imagery. Project page: https://chahyon-ku.github.io/owls/
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