F2A-ObjectNav: An Adaptive Agentic Architecture for Object-Goal Navigation
Object-goal navigation requires an embodied agent to explore an unfamiliar environment, identify a target object, navigate toward candidate instances, and reliably determine whether the observed object satisfies the mission goal. This work investigates this problem through a two-stage development process. In Stage I, a fixed modular framework is used to examine combinations of exploration, object detection, and target validation methods. The results reveal clear trade-offs among navigation performance, validation reliability, execution time, and model-related cost, with no single fixed configuration remaining preferable across all evaluated conditions. These observations motivate F2A-ObjectNav (Fixed-to-Adaptive Object-Goal Navigation), an adaptive agentic architecture in which a rule-based Supervisor coordinates specialized components for navigation and exploration, object detection, target validation, semantic guidance, and Mission Memory. The architecture uses event-driven recovery, strategy revision, candidate management, and conditional semantic guidance while retaining lightweight execution during normal operation. F2A-ObjectNav is evaluated over 25 episodes in each of AI2-THOR, RoboTHOR, and ProcTHOR, achieving success rate (SR) / success-weighted path length (SPL) values of 0.84/0.52, 0.40/0.22, and 0.44/0.37, respectively. In addition to task-level metrics, architecture-specific behavioral metrics are used to characterize semantic-guidance usage, strategy switching, recovery activation, memory-supported behavior, and decision stability. The results show different patterns of adaptive intervention across the three environments, with higher intervention frequencies observed in RoboTHOR and ProcTHOR than in AI2-THOR.