Enhancing Safety of Foundation Models for Visual Navigation through Collision Avoidance via Repulsive Estimation

Abstract: We propose CARE (Collision Avoidance via Repulsive Estimation), a plug-and-play module that enhances the safety of vision-based navigation without requiring additional range sensors or fine-tuning of pretrained models. While recent foundation models using only RGB inputs have shown strong performance, they often fail to generalize in out-of-distribution (OOD) environments with unseen objects or variations in camera parameters (e.g., field of view, pose, or focal length). Without fine-tuning, these models may generate unsafe trajectories that lead to collisions, requiring costly data collection and retraining. CARE addresses this limitation by seamlessly integrating with any RGB-based navigation system that outputs local trajectories, dynamically adjusting them using repulsive force vectors derived from monocular depth maps. We evaluate CARE by combining it with state-of-the-art vision-based navigation models across multiple robot platforms. CARE consistently reduces collision rates (up to 100%) without sacrificing goal-reaching performance and improves collision-free travel distance by up to 10.7x in exploration tasks.