CORE Planner: Contextual-memory Oriented Reinforcement-learning in Unknown Environments for Robot Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29222v1
• Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:17:23 GMT
• Title: CORE Planner: Contextual-memory Oriented Reinforcement-learning in Unknown Environments for Robot Navigation
• Abstract summary: We propose a Contextual-memory Oriented Reinforcement-learning (CORE) planner for robot navigation in unknown environments.<n>Our method uses a sparse visibility graph for structured environment representation, reducing the computational overhead of dense grid maps.<n>In real-world scenarios, CORE successfully navigates without human intervention, showcasing zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.
• Score: 6.717242436853575
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Autonomous navigation in unknown environments requires a robot to efficiently reach a predefined goal while exploring without prior maps. Although progress has been made in this area, most existing works still rely on traditional planning methods with hand-crafted rules, while learning-based methods often suffer from limited environmental memory and challenges in simulation-to-real (sim-to-real) transfer. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Contextual-memory Oriented Reinforcement-learning (CORE) planner for robot navigation in unknown environments. The proposed CORE planner effectively combines the core advantages of traditional and learning-based methods. Specifically, our method uses a sparse visibility graph for structured environment representation, reducing the computational overhead of dense grid maps, and employs a Transformer network to achieve a holistic environmental understanding, thereby significantly improving navigation efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a visibility graph-based graph sparsification method and a contextual memory mechanism, which alleviates local optima and enhances computational performance in large-scale scenes. Finally, our approach achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer after training solely on image-based environments, requiring no fine-tuning. Experimental results show that CORE Planner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including the traditional FAR Planner and all learning-based baselines, across representative environments, reducing travel distance by 13\% over traditional FAR Planner and by up to 48\% relative to learning-based baselines, with larger gains observed in more complex environments. In real-world scenarios, CORE successfully navigates without human intervention, showcasing zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Code is available at https://github.com/BBD00/core_planner.

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