Cross-Stage Sensorimotor Perception Scheduling and Sparse Map Encoding for Efficient Edge Embodied Navigation
About
Embodied agents must close a perception-to-action loop on embedded hardware under tight latency, memory, and energy budgets, making deployment a system-level co-design problem rather than a model-accuracy problem. We study this challenge for modular Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav), where our profiling shows semantic mapping dominates per-step latency while goal prediction dominates peak memory. We formulate edge embodied navigation deployment as a budget-constrained design-space problem and introduce two orthogonal optimization knobs: SKIP, an adaptive sensorimotor scheduler that formalizes safe skipping as a bounded map-impact criterion and learns a lightweight predictor to estimate it from cheap sensor cues at each \texttt{FORWARD} step, exposing a principled quality-efficiency knob (depth-based updates are always retained); and SCOUT, a sparse-context encoder that couples submanifold sparse convolutions on active map regions with a lightweight dense context stream. On HM3D across server and embedded platforms, SKIP+SCOUT delivers up to 1.7x end-to-end speedup, 50.5% lower peak memory, and 7.1% higher SPL than the dense baseline at the selected operating point, outperforming naively smaller perception backbones. SKIP transfers to a second modular pipeline (PONI) with near-lossless performance and remains robust under depth-sensor noise. Together, SKIP+SCOUT expose a family of device-aware Pareto operating points for edge physical AI systems.