TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv:2609.09158 · cs.RO, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-08 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-08

Updated: 2026-10-01

Code: https://github.com/unitreerobotics/unitree_rl_gym

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Foundation Model — 10× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Adaptation — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Success Rate — 8× in this paper
• Ablation — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation Studies — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Action Space — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Collision Rate — 4× in this paper
• Navigation Error — 4× in this paper
• Oracle Success Rate — 4× in this paper
• Digital Twin — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Flow Matching — 2× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes
• Foundation Models — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation — 2× in this paper
• Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Sim-to-Real Transfer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• VLA Models — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Action Chunking — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Edge Deployment — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Model Predictive Control (MPC) — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Physical Constraints — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning — 1× in this paper
• Rectified Flow — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Unified Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Zero-Shot Transfer — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control
• BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion
• Collision-Free Humanoid Traversal in Cluttered Indoor Scenes
• MM-Nav: Multi-View VLA Model for Robust Visual Navigation via Multi-Expert Learning
• Humanoid-VLA: Towards Universal Humanoid Control with Visual Integration
• TRAVEL: Training-Free Retrieval and Alignment for Vision-and-Language Navigation
• AsyncVLA: An Asynchronous VLA for Fast and Robust Navigation on the Edge
• Training-Time Action Conditioning for Efficient Real-Time Chunking
• SPAN-Nav: Generalized Spatial Awareness for Versatile Embodied Navigation
• LeVERB: Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Latent Vision-Language Instruction
• PhysiFlow: Physics-Aware Humanoid Whole-Body VLA via Multi-Brain Latent Flow Matching and Robust Tracking
• VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluation
• Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities
• SoftMimic: Learning Compliant Whole-body Control from Examples
• $\pi_{0.5}$: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization
• GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots
• Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report
• Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
• Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
• Scaling Behavior Foundation Model for Humanoid Robots

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