Human–AI Co-Navigation for Indoor Object Search under Uncertainty

Abstract

Assistive technologies for people with visual impairments increasingly use artificial intelligence to support object-finding and navigation in indoor environments. Yet fully autonomous perception remains unreliable in such settings, as indoor spaces are visually complex, only partially observable from the user’s current viewpoint, and subject to continuous change. Our work takes the position that effective assistive navigation is inherently collaborative; the system performs continuous perceptual processing, while the user provides occasional natural-language guidance when the search becomes uncertain or inefficient. To this end, we propose a human–AI collaboration framework that utilizes a Vision-Language Model (VLM) as the perceptual and semantic backbone of a navigation agent. A human user, modeled by a simulated intervention controller, provides sparse and structured guidance, which is integrated with the VLM to update its semantic search hypotheses toward the likely location of the target object. Evaluation is conducted in the Habitat simulator on photorealistic scenes from the Habitat-Matterport3D dataset. Experiments analyze how human guidance affects task success and navigation efficiency, showing that guidance is most effective when it corrects the VLM's misaligned semantic search hypotheses, providing insights into the role of minimal human input in VLM-based assistive navigation systems.

Keywords: Assistive Technology, Human-AI Collaboration, Vision-language Models, Indoor Navigation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007370