KinoUAV introduces a kinodynamic benchmark for UAV vision-language navigation, featuring a dataset and an agent that generate trajectories under velocity, acceleration, and jerk constraints. The benchmark incorporates directional free-space distance labels to guide safe motion decisions and a Cruise-Seek task that eases target search. Experiments show the KinoUAV-Agent achieves higher success rates with lower yaw and collision rates than existing methods.
By Chenyao Yang, Peijin Wang, Yingchao Feng, Wenhui Diao
The paper introduces VLN on the Fly, an onboard vision‑language navigation stack for aerial robots that separates grounding, planning, and control into inspectable stages. A quantized vision‑language model grounds instructions to a coarse image cell, depth estimation lifts this to a 3D goal, a fast B‑spline planner generates a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy translates the trajectory into motor commands. In controlled indoor flights, the stack achieved the target in 13 of 15 trials with a mean goal error of 5.72 cm and 39.3% GPU utilization, and successfully tracked collision‑free trajectories in cluttered environments.
By Marco S. Tayar, Felipe Tommaselli, Gianluca Capezutto, Pedro Antonio Rabelo Saraiva, Pedro H. V. de Freitas, Lucas Kido, Guilherme Sonego, Ricardo V. Godoy, Marcelo Becker
UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view.
arXiv:2606. 20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly.
By Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Yantian Shen, Zhikun Hu, Hongjun Wang, Yang Yang, Xindi Wang, Jiande Sun
arXiv:2607. 23565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe quadrotor navigation in cluttered and dynamic environments depends not only on instantaneous geometric perception, but more critically on anticipating collision risks induced by relative motion.
By Yuchao Mei, Guohao Zhang, Luxia Ai, Haopeng Chen, Wenbing Tao
arXiv:2606. 00747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autonomy, 3D spatial understanding is not merely a perception objective, but the safety interface between human instructions and physical flight.
By Jie Gao, Jie Ma, Kaihui Lin, Kai Ye, Miaohui Zhang, Pingyang Dai, Liujuan Cao
arXiv:2606. 03252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigating a drone in unseen and cluttered environments requires reliable generalization to unseen scene layouts and understanding of environmental structure relative to the robot's capabilities.
By Zian Liu, Andong Yang, Chunkai Yang, Ruidong An, Chao Gao, Guyue Zhou
The paper introduces a compact visual navigation system that decomposes the task into three analytically‑computed geometric interfaces and three small learned modules: an egress predictor, a navigation predictor, and an endpoint‑pinned residual diffusion generator. Only 0.58 M of the 23 M parameters are trained on 44 k frames, achieving competitive success rates and the lowest collision rate among evaluated methods across 6 060 point‑goal episodes in 60 environments. The design allows further parameter reduction by replacing the frozen image encoder with a 0.54 M MobileNetV2, supports zero‑shot deployment on a Jetson Orin Nano UGV, and enables transparent failure analysis under sensor corruption.
By Edward Beng Wai Tan, Siew-Kei Lam
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently emerged as important remote sensing platforms, and UAV navigation has shown great potential in remote sensing applications. However, existing methods do n...
Safe quadrotor navigation in cluttered and dynamic environments depends not only on instantaneous geometric perception, but more critically on anticipating collision risks induced by relative motion. Conventional modular pipelines frequently suffer from perception latency, while end-to-end learning methods relying on implicit scalar rewards often struggle to extract reliable spatio-temporal features without physics-grounded supervision.
arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.
By Zecheng Yin, Benedict Jun Ma
Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (AGC-VLN) pairs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a global bird’s‑eye view and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with a local first‑person view, creating a shared bird’s‑eye map that enables collaboration. The training‑free baseline decomposes navigation into VLM‑based semantic reasoning and deterministic geometric execution, allowing the UAV to render the UGV’s pose and target markers while the UGV plans a road‑following path using the shared map. In CARLA‑Air’s Town10HD scene, AGC‑VLN achieves a 77.0% joint success rate, a 27.0% improvement over the weaker individual agent and surpasses the strongest single‑agent baseline by 24.0 points.