arXiv Machine Learning

CAVEAT: Recurrent Multimodal Diffusion Planning for Mapless Aerial Exploration

arXiv AI
Jun 3

AirDreamer: Generalist Drone Navigation with World Models

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
arXiv AI
Sep 18

VLN on the Fly: An Onboard Vision-Language Navigation Stack for Aerial Robots

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 Computer Vision
Sep 25

Learning to Navigate with Minimal Parameters: Decomposing Visual Navigation Through Closed-Form Geometric Interfaces

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

ObstaDiff is a diffusion-policy framework that introduces a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder to generate structured representations of targets, obstacles, and background. By aligning these representations, the policy produces end-effector trajectories that focus on a target-centered bottleneck pose while accounting for surrounding obstacles. In real-robot greenhouse trials, ObstaDiff achieved a 75.41% task success rate and an 8.20% obstacle collision rate, outperforming existing imitation-learning baselines in cluttered agricultural settings.

By Jiawen Wang, Kevin Yao, Khalid Jawed