StepNav: Efficient Planning with Structured Trajectory Priors

1University of Chinese Academy of Sciences 2Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, CAS
*Corresponding Author

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026

Abstract

We present StepNav, an efficient planning framework for visual navigation that generates reliable trajectories using structured trajectory priors. Unlike existing methods that rely on unstructured noise, StepNav leverages multi-modal trajectory initialization combined with conditional flow matching for efficient and safe path generation. Our approach incorporates a success probability field that predicts safe navigation regions and a dynamics-inspired feature projection module that enforces physical continuity in spatiotemporal features. Experiments demonstrate that StepNav achieves superior navigation performance while maintaining real-time efficiency suitable for autonomous systems.

Navigation Demonstrations

BibTeX

@inproceedings{luo2026stepnav,
  title={StepNav: Efficient Planning with Structured Trajectory Priors},
  author={Luo, Xubo and Wu, Aodi and Han, Haodong and Wan, Xue and Zhang, Wei and Shu, Leizheng and Wang, Ruisuo},
  booktitle={IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year={2026}
}