Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Pascal Roth, Marco Hutter, Cesar Cadena
Web services provide walking directions for nearly every city, but following them reliably over long routes remains challenging for autonomous robots. Point-goal navigation policies rely heavily on accurate GNSS, while most vision-language navigation models struggle to execute even short instructions outdoors. We present WayTrace, a hierarchical system that connects web-map directions to robot motion through language. An off-the-shelf orchestrator vision-language model reads the turn-by-turn directions, a satellite map and recent camera images, and issues one atomic language command at a time, such as "cross the road to the left". An onboard trace predictor, trained on over one million automatically labelled samples from street-level images, draws the path for this command in the image, and a reinforcement learning policy tracks it. In long-range simulated missions, WayTrace remains robust to GNSS noise and rarely leaves crosswalks or sidewalks, while point-goal baselines degrade sharply with about ten times more violations. Deployed on a wheeled-legged robot, WayTrace completes real-world missions of up to 1.37 km at about 1.1 m/s through a busy city centre, rural trails and a university campus, handling crosswalks, staircases and construction sites. Project page: https://way-trace.github.io
Alex Brandes, Haig Conti Georges Sajelian, Manthan Patel, Dominik Hollidt, Chenhao Li, Matthias Heyrman, Oliver Hausdoerfer, Manuel Kaufmann 等 14 位作者
Deploying humanoid robots in unstructured terrain remains an open problem. While classic reinforcement learning struggles with the sheer complexity of real-world interactions, more promising methods leveraging human priors remain limited to models lacking contextual awareness. The restricted motion synthesis is a direct consequence of existing dataset pipelines failing to capture human-scene sequences in challenging environments. To bridge this gap between humanoid learning and scene reconstruction, we introduce the Egocentric Human-Terrain Reconstruction (EgoHTR) dataset. We develop and open-source a reconstruction pipeline capturing 55 scene-aligned 4D human motion sequences in diverse, complex environments using a multi-sensor setup of egocentric wearables and a portable 3D scanner. The resulting dataset comprises over 150k frames, which we evaluate against motion-capture ground truth, demonstrating state-of-the-art accuracy and establishing a rigorous benchmark for human motion analysis and synthesis. Further, we leverage this data to train perceptive locomotion policies, demonstrating hardware deployment on a Unitree G1 for reconstructed reference motions. Our pipeline enables community-driven dataset extensions and factors the problem to help researchers build foundational, context-aware robots that reliably traverse uneven terrain.
Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Mayank Mittal, Fan Yang, Alexander Hansson, Amir Bar, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
Depth sensors are widely deployed across robotic platforms, and advances in fast, high-fidelity depth simulation have enabled robotic policies trained on depth observations to achieve robust sim-to-real transfer for a wide range of tasks. Despite this, representation learning for depth modality remains underexplored compared to RGB, where large-scale foundation models now define the state of the art. To address this gap, we present DeFM, a self-supervised foundation model trained entirely on depth images for robotic applications. Using a DINO-style self-distillation objective on a curated dataset of 60M depth images, DeFM learns geometric and semantic representations that generalize to diverse environments, tasks, and sensors. To retain metric awareness across multiple scales, we introduce a novel input normalization strategy. We further distill DeFM into compact models suitable for resource-constrained robotic systems. When evaluated on depth-based classification, segmentation, navigation, locomotion, and manipulation benchmarks, DeFM achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates strong generalization from simulation to real-world environments. We release all our pretrained models, which can be adopted off-the-shelf for depth-based robotic learning without task-specific fine-tuning. Webpage: https://de-fm.github.io/