arXiv:2608. 04121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-based guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) toward unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) supports cooperative aerial--ground robotics, but reliable continuous yaw estimation from onboard vision remains challenging because of sensing uncertainty, limited computation, and the need for interpretable control.
arXiv:2609.22353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile river monitoring robots must interpret obstacles and water boundaries that geographic waypoints alone cannot describe. On resource constrained p...
Remote-sensing and UAV applications need models that generalize across platforms and viewpoints without task-specific training. Yet training-free pipelines often falter on oriented geometry, scale/rotation variation, and crowded ports or airfields, and rarely unify detection and segmentation.
WareFly-VLA is a photorealistic vision‑language‑action framework and dataset for UAV navigation and human tracking in smart warehouses. It comprises 507 human‑teleoperated flight episodes with 8,504 high‑resolution RGB transitions, each paired with a natural‑language description of a target worker and a synchronized four‑degree‑of‑freedom control command. The benchmark evaluates four open‑source VLA architectures on tasks such as target approach and person following, revealing significant challenges for language‑conditioned aerial control under realistic warehouse conditions.
arXiv:2608. 11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based UAV aerial image understanding and reasoning is essential for aerial intelligence yet poses distinct challenges arising from extreme scale variation, arbitrary camera orientations, and high object density.
The paper evaluates out‑of‑the‑box object detection models for automatic target detection and recognition (ATD/R) in military settings. Six YOLO variants and two DETR variants were benchmarked on a new military dataset featuring vehicles, occlusions, and small targets, with performance measured in mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 across air‑to‑ground and ground‑to‑ground perspectives. Findings show larger models and DETR-based approaches perform best, fine‑tuning on the VisDrone dataset improves air‑to‑ground and small‑object performance, yet all models still struggle with small targets in air‑to‑ground scenarios.
This study explores temporal neural networks for estimating the end‑effector position of an aerial continuum manipulator (ACM) affected by aerodynamic disturbances from a UAV. An experimental dataset covering stationary and free‑hovering conditions across various robot configurations and altitudes was used to evaluate strain‑parameterized kinematic models and to benchmark a closed‑form continuous‑time (CfC) neural network against an MLP and a GRU. The CfC network achieved a 22 mm RMSE, outperforming the MLP (36 mm) and GRU (28 mm) by 39.5 % and 20.6 %, respectively, demonstrating the advantage of continuous‑time learning for this task.
arXiv:2603. 04277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous aerial robots operating in GPS-denied or communication-degraded environments frequently lose access to camera metadata and telemetry, leaving onboard perception systems unable to recover the absolute metric scale of the scene.
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:2512. 18046v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems.
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is important for low-altitude perception, unmanned-system warning, and security monitoring. However, weak targets in infrared imagery usually occupy only a few pixels and are easily submerged by cloud clutter, ground edges, and bright noise, making it difficult for lightweight segmentation-based methods to preserve local target structures while suppressing background interference.
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.