LiteNav: Lightweight Map-free Outdoor Visual Navigation

Outdoor robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a formidable challenge, necessitating robust traversability assessment and collision-free planning. While traditional map-based approaches struggle with adaptability to novel scenes, existing map-free methods frequently incur high computational costs and depend heavily on LiDAR data. In response, we propose LiteNav, a vision-only for exteroceptive sensing and strictly map-free outdoor navigation system. Relying solely on a single off-the-shelf RGB camera and GPS for goal specification, LiteNav estimates traversability, encodes navigation goals, and generates candidate trajectories via a diffusion-based joint encoding model. These trajectories are then refined by a goal-oriented planner to ensure correctness, efficiency, and safety. Remarkably, LiteNav achieves performance comparable to LiDAR-equipped methods without ever constructing or referencing explicit maps. Deployed on a low-power NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, it operates in real time, consuming only one-fifth of the computational resources required by prior approaches. Experiments demonstrate that LiteNav achieves state-of-the-art results on the GND dataset and outperforms existing methods in real-world scenarios. In summary, LiteNav is a map-free outdoor navigation system that operates using monocular RGB perception and GPS goal cues on an embedded platform, demonstrating strong potential for scalable deployment.