G-DRAGON: Geospatial Reasoning and Dynamic Planning for Retrieval-Augmented Outdoor Navigation

Autonomous ground robots operating in large-scale outdoor environments require both robust long-range navigation and fine-grained 'last-mile' exploration. Current advances in visual-language navigation (VLN) work well at short-range tasks, lacking geospatial grounding for long-distance missions. Some OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based methods relying on cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to factual hallucination and cannot conduct 'last-mile' exploration based on human instruction. To address these challenges, we present G-DRAGON, a retrieval-augmented framework for outdoor, open-world navigation. This framework maps natural-language commands to versioned, local OSM entities via generative retrieval based on lightweight LLM, yielding accurate coordinates for global route planning. A high-level planning module bridges global topological routes with the SLAM system, projecting geospatial waypoints into the robot's navigable frame. For the 'last mile,' the framework transitions to frontier-based exploration and open-set semantic voxel mapping to localize open-vocabulary targets. Experimental results in simulation demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we validate the system in unseen real-world urban environments on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), successfully completing person-search missions with trajectories of up to 500 m.