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
arXiv:2609.17628v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Active perception allows autonomous agents to select their viewpoints rather than passively process the viewpoints given to them, enabling them to ta...
By \"U. Bora G\"okbakan (WILLOW), St\'ephane Caron (ISIR), Philippe Sou\`eres (LAAS-GEPETTO)
arXiv:2608. 09467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments.
By Boxiong Wang, Hui Kang, Geng Sun, Jiahui Li, Chao Yu, Daxin Tian
arXiv:2609.36915v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Aerial manipulators extend robotic manipulation into 3D workspaces that are difficult for ground-based robots to access, creating new opportunities f...
By Rui Huang, Yanlin Mu, Lidong Li, Yucong Wang, Zichen Yan, Lin Zhao
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: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
Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments. Although recent end-to-end UAV vision-language-action (UAV-VLA) policies reduce reliance on separately designed perception, planning, and control modules, their behavior-cloning objectives provide limited corrective supervision for interactive closed-loop execution.
arXiv:2607. 20785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently.
By Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
arXiv:2609.13243v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We present GzDRL, a novel single-process reinforcement learning (RL) framework for Gazebo that overcomes longstanding bottlenecks in scalable, reprod...
By Amal Dev Haridevan, Junjie Kang, Jinjun Shan
The paper proposes a reward-based policy that relies only on rewards and actions, enabling zero‑shot transfer between source and target environments with entirely different observation spaces. Experiments on Pointmass, Cartpole, 2D Car Racing, and the Stretch robot in Habitat‑Sim show that the policy can adapt to new visual styles or 3D renderings without additional samples. Additionally, the reward policy can guide the training of an observation‑based policy in the target environment.
By Morgan Byrd, Maks Sorokin, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
The paper introduces a visual odometry frontend that automatically and continuously adapts its parameters using an image-conditioned reinforcement learning policy. The policy selects key tuning values—FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold—based on a lightweight image embedding and frontend statistics, with a privileged critic aiding training. Trained on synthetic data, the approach transfers zero‑shot to real-world benchmarks, improving the tracking‑computation trade‑off by up to 8% in accuracy and 57% in runtime compared to static configurations.
By Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv:2509.18778v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Visual imitation learning frameworks allow robots to learn manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. While existing approaches mainly f...
By Shijia Ge, Yijun Liu, Yinxin Zhang, Shuzhao Xie, Weixiang Zhang, Mingcai Zhou, Zhi Wang