RNR-Nav: A Real-World Visual Navigation System Using Renderable Neural Radiance Maps

We propose a novel visual localization and navigation framework for real-world environments directly integrating observed visual information into the bird-eye-view map. While the renderable neural radiance map (RNR-Map) [1] shows considerable promise in simulated settings, its deployment in real-world scenarios poses undiscovered challenges. RNR-Map utilizes projections of multiple vectors into a single latent code, resulting in information loss under suboptimal conditions. To address such issues, our enhanced RNR-Map for real-world robots, RNR-Map++, incorporates strategies to mitigate information loss, such as a weighted map and positional encoding. For robust real-time localization, we integrate a particle filter into the correlation-based localization framework using RNR-Map++ without a rendering procedure. Consequently, we establish a real-world robot system for visual navigation utilizing RNR-Map++, which we call "RNR-Nav." Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly enhance rendering quality and localization robustness compared to previous approaches. In real-world navigation tasks, RNR-Nav achieves a success rate of 84.4%, marking a 68.8% enhancement over the methods of the original RNR-Map paper.