T-araVLN: Translator for Agricultural Robotic Agents on Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv cs.RO / 3/27/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces T-araVLN, a translator module designed to improve agricultural vision-and-language navigation by converting noisy or mistaken natural-language instructions into refined representations for robotic agents.
  • It builds on AgriVLN and extends the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) paradigm to agricultural settings via the A2A benchmark, targeting navigation to goal positions using natural language.
  • Experiments show AgriVLN handles simple instructions well but struggles with complex ones, motivating the instruction translation approach in T-araVLN.
  • On the A2A evaluation, T-araVLN raises Success Rate from 0.47 to 0.63 and lowers Navigation Error from 2.91m to 2.28m, setting state-of-the-art results for the agricultural VLN domain.
  • The authors release code on GitHub to support reproducibility and further research in agricultural instruction-following navigation.

Abstract

Agricultural robotic agents have been becoming useful helpers in a wide range of agricultural tasks. However, they still heavily rely on manual operations or fixed railways for movement. To address this limitation, the AgriVLN method and the A2A benchmark pioneeringly extend Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to the agricultural domain, enabling agents to navigate to the target positions following the natural language instructions. We observe that AgriVLN can effectively understands the simple instructions, but often misunderstands the complex ones. To bridge this gap, we propose the T-araVLN method, in which we build the instruction translator module to translate noisy and mistaken instructions into refined and precise representations. When evaluated on A2A, our T-araVLN successfully improves Success Rate (SR) from 0.47 to 0.63 and reduces Navigation Error (NE) from 2.91m to 2.28m, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance in the agricultural VLN domain. Code: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/T-araVLN.