Aerial image-goal navigation requires an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to reach a target location specified by a goal image. Existing world-model-based methods rank candidate trajectories using predicted futures, but typically rely on only one or a few point predictions, which is inadequate for large-scale outdoor environments with substantial future-state uncertainty.
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:2607. 21400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions.
Test-time scaling offers a promising method to improve the inference performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. Existing approaches to vision-language navigation (VLN) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) typically relies on a single inference pass, which can falter in complex environments by producing suboptimal or unsafe trajectories.
RiskWorld is a risk‑aware world modeling framework that forecasts shared occupancy and selectively replaces planned trajectories in automated driving. It fuses spatial risk fields, temporal actor context, and visual bird’s‑eye‑view features, using flow‑guided evolution to transport occupancy and signed residuals to correct it. In open‑loop planning on nuScenes, RiskWorld achieves the lowest collision rate over a 3‑second horizon and the second‑best average L2 error, running at 11.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090.
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.
SatNav is a new, scalable benchmark for long‑horizon vision‑language navigation (VLN) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), built from high‑resolution satellite imagery. It generates 118,000 navigation episodes across 59 scenes in 18 cities, using satellite crops to approximate UAV nadir views and featuring three task families—Boundary, Landmark, and Route—to test long‑term memory and geospatial reasoning. The benchmark also introduces SwiftVLN, a modular framework for memory component experimentation, and demonstrates that models trained on satellite data can transfer to real‑flight UAV observations.
The paper introduces Feel‑WM, an off‑road navigation world model that incorporates proprioceptive data to predict both visual scenes and the robot’s physical sensations such as slip, tilt, and shake. By learning a future proprioceptive state and failure risk from the robot’s own experience, the model can evaluate planned trajectories using a separable score that balances goal similarity with predicted failure risk. Experiments on real and simulated off‑road data show that Feel‑WM outperforms visual‑only models in both open‑loop planning and closed‑loop navigation for wheeled and legged robots, and it successfully guides a Husky robot around rough terrain on mountain trails where an end‑to‑end policy fails.
RiverVLN introduces the first benchmark for long‑horizon vision‑language navigation (VLN) of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in continuous riverine motion. The PGT‑NAV framework converts navigation instructions into an ordered sequence of visually verifiable semantic phases, maintaining an active phase online through grounded visual and motion evidence. This phase‑grounded approach reduces recursive position and heading drift, achieving a 0.79 success rate in Unity‑ROS closed‑loop tests and demonstrating transfer to real‑world USV deployment.
arXiv:2606. 04111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indoor UAV navigation requires efficient exploration, scene understanding, and reliable trajectory execution under limited field-of-view observations.
arXiv:2606. 06147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise in UAV navigation.
arXiv:2608. 15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous navigation in complex outdoor environments, where dynamic conditions and mission requirements require intelligent adaptive decision-making.