Vision-Language Models for Deployable Social Robot Navigation: Bridging Semantic Reasoning and Low-Level Control

arXiv:2606.28760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social robot navigation (SRN) requires more than geometric path planning; it demands understanding human intentions, social norms, and contextual cues to generate socially compliant behaviors. Although classical navigation methods provide reliable metric planning and collision avoidance, they often lack the semantic reasoning capabilities necessary for operation in complex human-centered environments. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs...