{"id":6882,"date":"2026-01-30T16:38:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T15:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/?p=6882"},"modified":"2026-02-20T17:49:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T16:49:44","slug":"exploration-and-application-of-vision-language-navigation-vln-for-legged-robots-in-subway-tunnel-environments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/2026\/exploration-and-application-of-vision-language-navigation-vln-for-legged-robots-in-subway-tunnel-environments\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploration and Application of Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) for Legged Robots in Subway Tunnel Environments"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This thesis investigates whether <strong>Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN)<\/strong> can be reliably transferred from conventional benchmarks to <strong>subway tunnel environments<\/strong>, enabling a quadruped robot to execute inspection-oriented navigation tasks under <strong>constrained geometry, degraded visibility, and limited connectivity<\/strong>. The work is motivated by recent <strong>vision-language-action<\/strong> approaches that connect language grounding with embodied control for legged platforms (e.g., NaVILA) [1], while the applicability of such paradigms to tunnel settings remains underexplored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The study uses an existing tunnel environment dataset (visual and structural information) and a high-fidelity tunnel simulation setup to <strong>train and evaluate<\/strong> a VLN model. Evaluation will focus on instruction-following success, path efficiency, robustness to tunnel-specific disturbances, and (optionally) transfer to real-world deployment on a physical quadruped robot, following standard VLN evaluation practices [2,6].<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This paper is co-advised with Fan Yang (yang@icom.rwth-aachen.de) at ICoM (Institute for Construction Management, Digital Engineering and Robotics in Construction). The second supervisor is Dr. Hendrik Morgenstern (morgenstern@icom.rwth-aachen.de).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This thesis investigates whether Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) can be reliably transferred from conventional benchmarks to subway tunnel environments, enabling a quadruped robot to execute inspection-oriented navigation tasks under constrained geometry, degraded visibility, and limited connectivity. The work is motivated by recent vision-language-action approaches that connect language grounding with embodied control for legged platforms (e.g., NaVILA) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[83,82],"class_list":["post-6882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thesis","tag-legged-robots","tag-vlm"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6882"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6935,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6882\/revisions\/6935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}