Task-Aware Environment Augmentation for Reliable Navigation via Shielded Conditional Diffusion
For robots operating in partially observable environments, this work provides a novel method to augment the environment with markers to improve navigation reliability, though the problem is relatively niche.
This paper addresses the problem of task-aware environment augmentation for reliable robot navigation under partial observability. SCoDA, a shielded conditional diffusion model, learns to place a limited number of visual fiducial markers to improve localization support along a planned trajectory, achieving better execution reliability and completion time over baselines in simulations and hardware tests.
Reliable trajectory planning under partial observability depends not only on computing a feasible geometric path, but also on whether the robot receives informative observations while executing that trajectory. Existing approaches usually keep the environment fixed and adapt the robot through belief-space planning, active localization, or added sensing, often incurring costly uncertainty propagation and brittle behavior in observation-poor regions. We flip this perspective and address the largely open problem of \emph{task-aware environment augmentation}: given a mapped environment, a planned task trajectory, and a small budget of visual fiducial markers, where should the environment be augmented so that the planned trajectory can be executed reliably under uncertainty? Our key observation is that useful marker layouts are defined by the localization support they provide along the task trajectory: a small number of well-timed observations can be sufficient to prevent uncertainty from accumulating in regions where state-estimation error would otherwise compromise control. Building on this observation, we present \tbp{SCoDA}, $\textbf{S}$hielded $\textbf{Co}$nditional $\textbf{D}$iffusion for Environment $\textbf{A}$ugmentation. \tbp{SCoDA} learns a conditional distribution over high-performing fiducial layouts from data, using the environment, planned trajectory, disturbance context, and desired execution profile as conditioning. Its shielded sampler reasons over where along the planned execution pose corrections should occur, and steers this distribution toward task-relevant, finite-budget augmentations. Across simulated benchmarks and hardware deployments, we show that \tbp{SCoDA} improves trajectory execution reliability and completion time over strong baselines. Code, models and dataset available at: \hyperlink{scoda-diffusion.github.io}{https://scoda-diffusion.github.io/}