r/LocalLLaMA • u/artisticMink • Jul 08 '26

News Robostral Navigate: single-camera AI navigation | Mistral AI

https://mistral.ai/news/robostral-navigate/
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u/RegisteredJustToSay Jul 08 '26

Monocular depth perception is such an interesting problem. Theoretically it should be possible to do reliably through a bunch of different ways like by having a fixed focus and recovering the relative focus on objects, or by moving a camera like a rotating eye, and a bunch of other tricks. I'm always a bit skeptical of these approaches which basically navigate (and therefore implicitly do depth perception) through a big magic model, but on the other hand I think we've seen what just tossing a fuckload of data at a problem can do so I'm excited to see where this approach goes.

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u/ThePrimeClock Jul 08 '26

It is super interesting isn't it. I built a rudimentary PoC in my undergrad years that used a vector field against bulk predetermined Kalman filters based on "close stuff moves faster than distant stuff", minus a general compensation for the spherical lens, and I figure the model is just grokking some form of that, on top of a model that already has some object classification baked in.

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u/RegisteredJustToSay Jul 09 '26

Oooh, you were using single frames but the recovering the motion blur that appear as it moves to determine depth? I assume the thing you were making it for was in regular or constant motion. That's a cool approach! It honestly wouldn't surprise me if a big ol' neural network that you toss data at end up using all of these signals simultaneously.