# OWLS: Open-world language-conditioned speed fields for zero-shot rover navigation

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-26T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/jzs2n0ukzbd2forsobd4182j6
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32596

## Summary

The authors propose OWLS (Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields), which plans directly over the dense feature maps of a vision-language model (VLM): given a description of traversable terrain, the VLM scores every pixel of a single camera image, and OWLS projects these scores onto the ground, adapts them to the platform with two morphological operations, and uses them as the speed field of a minimum-time planner, so that terrain appearance and obstacle spacing jointly shape a single trajectory.