IntentReact: Guiding Reactive Object-Centric Navigation via Topological Intent

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IntentReact leverages intent signal to correct early deviations and maintain topological consistency, yielding trajectories more efficient than the mapping path.

Overview

  • We propose an intent-conditioned object-centric navigation framework that introduces a global topological intent into a reactive controller, enabling an effective bridge between global planning and local decision-making under partial observability.
  • We introduce a compact next-hop intent representation that captures minimal global guidance to resolve local ambiguity while maintaining consistency with topological progress.
  • We present a feasibility-aware waypoint refinement module that enforces geometric consistency via BEV-based traversability, forming a unified loop between learned control and explicit feasibility reasoning.

IntentReact Pipeline

IntentReact Navigation Pipeline
  • 1) Offline Mapping: We construct an object-level topological map with 3D node information.
  • 2) Online association: During online execution, the current observation is matched to the map to obtain a set of query nodes.
  • 3) Global topological planning: For each query node, global planning is performed to obtain a shortest path, from which an object-level costmap is built and an intent vector indicating the direction of decreasing topological distance is computed and fed into the local control stage.
  • 4) Intent-conditioned local control: The local controller predicts waypoints from an object-centric costmap, with intent acting as a conditional signal to modulate feature representations and provide global guidance.
  • 5) Waypoint refinement: A BEV costmap is further used to correct the feasibility of the predicted waypoint, forming a unified closed loop between learned control and geometric feasibility.

More Comparison Results

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ObjectReact initially turns toward the correct direction, but lacks consistent guidance near the goal and ultimately drifts away. IntentReact successfully reaches the goal without drifting.

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IntentReact matches ObjectReact when no ambiguity exists, indicating that intent acts as a soft bias that intervenes only under directional ambiguity without disrupting the underlying reactive control.

Real-world Deployment

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