EMS-Nav: Embodied Multi-Scale Navigation

arXiv:2611.15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial inspection robots must reach work areas and specific equipment. These destinations span spatial scales from regions to objects, so robots must relate each target to its surroundings to interpret the task and determine where to go. Existing methods support multi-scale navigation through rich environment representations, but at substantial computational and storage cost. These costs limit deployment where wireless coverage is incomplete and robots must rely on onboard computation to keep navigating. We introduce EMS-Nav, a biologically inspired multi-scale navigation framework for online, on-device operation. Its core innovation is to organize perception, spatial understanding, and navigation around regions, making local spaces the basic units of both environmental understanding and computation. EMS-Nav groups objects and their relationships into functionally meaningful spaces and builds a hierarchy from local areas to the broader environment. This organization supports efficient map construction alongside the interpretation and execution of language goals at different scales. In multi-scale navigation experiments, EMS-Nav achieves the highest success rates across all four target categories: objects, rooms, regions, and specific instances. It outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary mapping and navigation methods, improving overall first-attempt success by 9.39 percentage points over the strongest baseline while reducing mapping overhead and language-model input size. Local deployment in real indoor environments further demonstrates its applicability to on-device embodied navigation. By establishing regions as the organizing basis for perception, spatial understanding, and language-guided action, EMS-Nav provides a system that combines multi-scale understanding with computational efficiency to support diverse language goals on resource-constrained robots.