2026-09-20T08:54:11Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129393 2025-10-20 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8888 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8887 com_2142_234

application/pdf en text Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms The student, Justin Wasserman, accepted the attached license on 2025-04-13 at 13:29. The student, Justin Wasserman, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-04-13 at 13:36. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-04-15 at 06:55. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21753 on 2025-10-19 at 18:18:07 Learning for open-world mobile robots Wasserman, Justin 2025-04-15 Chowdhary, Girish Chowdhary, Girish Driggs-Campbell, Katie Schwing, Alexander Wang, Shenlong robotics embodied ai simulator navigation open-world artificial intelligence computer vision machine learning eng Deploying robots from a lab setting to open-world environments requires understanding semantic information and leveraging large data sources. Various paradigms have been introduced to tackle semantic visual-goal navigation, where an agent is placed in a random environment and must reach a goal. We first decompose this task into two components: (1) a data-driven exploration policy that learns semantics and environmental relations and (2) a geometric-based policy specialized for goal-directed navigation. Beyond this decomposition, we investigate whether further structure can enhance performance. To this end, we retrain the exploration policy with guidance from the geometric policy. Additionally, we explore a sim-to-real approach to improve state estimation for legged robots, enabling robust odometry prediction across diverse scenarios. This thesis presents real-world experiments supporting each of these works in mobile robotics. Future work is finally discussed towards the development of a foundation model for navigation. 2025-05 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129393 Copyright 2025 Justin Wasserman Electrical & Computer Eng Electrical & Computer Engr University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. Dissertation