The paper introduces DroneCATS-Agent, a modular framework that places a multimodal large language model (MLLM) at the core of a drone’s control loop, allowing the model to decide actions solely from prompts. It presents the DroneCATS benchmark, evaluating MLLMs on four tasks—approaching, tracking, searching, and multi‑drone commanding—without fine‑tuning or function‑calling. Results show that while small open models can navigate reliably, they often fail by mismanaging protocol termination, highlighting a gap between perception and action planning in current MLLMs.
arXiv:2608. 12308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to integrate visual evidence over time, plan future actions, and determine when it has reached a navigation goal under partial observability.
arXiv:2608. 07557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV-VLN) requires rapid and reactive control in complex 3D environments.
arXiv:2606. 14772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions.
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.
Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation (AGC‑VLN) pairs a UAV with a global bird’s‑eye view and a UGV with a local first‑person view, creating a shared bird’s‑eye map that displays the UGV’s pose and the target location. The UAV localizes the target in its downward view and flies toward it, while the UGV uses the shared map to plan a road‑following path with a frozen VLM and execute it under closed‑loop control. 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 outperforms the strongest single‑agent baseline by 24.0 points.
arXiv:2606. 12402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability.
arXiv:2605. 20306v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce WildRoadBench, a wild aerial road-damage grounding benchmark that couples direct visual grounding by vision-language models with autonomous research-and-engineering by LLM-driven agents on a single professionally annotated UAV corpus.
arXiv:2606. 06836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-guided UAV agents must execute long-horizon semantic instructions while producing smooth, physically feasible continuous flight commands, yet existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks typically use discrete or coarse actions and existing UAV Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks focus on short, atomic maneuvers.
arXiv:2607. 21400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions.
arXiv:2608. 11739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing recipe for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models couples a pretrained VLM with a separately trained flow-matching action expert.
arXiv:2609.08402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air-Ground Object Search (AGOS) in urban environments is a challenging embodied task, which requires an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned...
arXiv:2607. 08359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs.