Navigation & SLAM

Waypoint

A waypoint is an intermediate target position or pose along a robot's route or trajectory, used to decompose long-horizon motion into a sequence of local goals. Navigation stacks chain waypoints through global and local planners, while in manipulation, waypoint-based policies predict sparse end-effector poses that a motion planner or low-level controller interpolates, trading control-rate reasoning for temporal abstraction.

Why it matters for physical AI

Sparse waypoints compress long-horizon behavior into a few decisions, which shortens the effective horizon for learned policies and makes high-level plans from language models directly executable by conventional controllers.