Language-Grounded Semantic Target Navigation for Autonomous Surface Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) are increasingly expected to operate in ports and harbour environments, where operators may specify navigation targets through language-based descriptions rather than predefined coordinates or fixed target identifiers. However, existing ASV navigation methods mainly execute predefined geometric goals or task-specific objectives and give limited attention to language-grounded target specification. This study proposes Semantically Grounded Navigation (SGNav), a framework that enables an ASV to identify and approach a maritime target from an operator-provided description. SGNav integrates text-guided semantic grounding, harbour-aware candidate filtering, CLIP-based semantic verification, grounded target control-state construction, and Proximal Policy Optimisation-based closed-loop control. It grounds the target description in onboard RGB observations, suppresses visually or semantically irrelevant distractors, and converts the selected target into a compact control-oriented representation for policy execution. Experiments in simulated port environments show that SGNav achieves success rates of $97.0\pm1.2\%$, $92.0\pm1.5\%$, and $90.0\pm1.8\%$ across three representative target-reaching tasks, with semantic target accuracy above $97\%$ and wrong-target rates below $3\%$. SGNav also maintains $97.7$--$98.7\%$ success rates across held-out port layouts. In the Task~3 ablation study, removing harbour-aware filtering or semantic consistency reduces the success rate to $40.4\pm2.6\%$ and $50.4\pm3.1\%$, respectively. These findings demonstrate the importance of semantic grounding, harbour-aware filtering, and semantic verification for reliable language-grounded ASV navigation. These results indicate that the proposed perception-to-control framework can support language-grounded target approach manoeuvres of ASV under the complex port environments.