ZONDA: Zero-shot Object Navigation with Dynamic Avoidance in Multi-floor Environments

Abstract

In Object Goal Navigation task, existing methods are typically restricted to static and single-floor environments, ignoring cross-floor topologies and dynamic pedestrian, which limits their real-world deployment. To address these limitations, we propose ZONDA, a zero-shot object navigation with dynamic avoidance framework. In particular, ZONDA integrates three core components: (i) Heuristic multi-floor planning: from height-difference traversable maps, enables stair traversal and cross-floor exploration without a platform-specific learned controller; (ii) Multi-view target verification: cross-checks multi-scale observations with a vision-language model, significantly reducing false positives; and (iii) Dynamic pedestrian avoidance: explicitly tracks and predicts moving pedestrians to generate anticipatory behaviors. Evaluated on a real Direct Drive Tech TITA biped robot and extensive simulations on HM3D and MP3D, ZONDA achieves significantly improved results. Moreover, ZONDA can maintain robust navigation on the dynamic benchmark HM3D-DYNA compared to the existing baseline.