NavGen introduces a text-to-video data generation pipeline that creates about 400K vision‑language navigation episodes for both indoor and outdoor scenes, using high‑fidelity visual generative models. The approach includes a style‑diversification method to scale up rare, hard‑to‑collect data. Models trained on NavGen data outperform those trained on existing UAV navigation datasets and achieve a 75% success rate in real‑world flying experiments.
By Xijie Huang, Yongyang Wan, Chengbin Dong, Zimo Ding, Mo Zhu, Yijin Wang, Zhiyang Liu, Fei Gao, Yuze Wu, Xin Zhou
The paper explores a synthetic-first training approach for detecting drones in medium- and long-wave infrared imagery, combining synthetic scene generation with fine-tuning on real data. It demonstrates that synthetic data can establish initial object representations, but real infrared data is crucial to close domain gaps and improve reliability. The study finds that aligning datasets has a greater impact on performance than increasing model size, and that semantic alignment in feature space is the strongest predictor of success, with radiometric factors like entropy and dynamic range also contributing.
By Tanel Liiv, Sander Soodla, Nzamba Bignoumba, Alma M. Liezenga, Toomas Pruuden
The paper introduces the Wide-area Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding (WSTU) problem, which demands simultaneous wide-area coverage, per-target resolution, and temporal continuity—capabilities lacking in existing datasets. To address this, the authors present HARD, an ultra‑high‑resolution (12768×9564) UAV dataset annotated for object detection, multi‑object tracking, and scene‑level visual question answering. They also propose a latency‑aware metric, streaming‑HOTA (s‑HOTA), and show through baseline experiments that high resolution and processing latency significantly impact detection, tracking, and VQA performance, revealing gaps in current methods for WSTU.
By Yuhang Zhu, Meiyi Zhu, Yunkai Dang, Zhangnan Li, Yuxuan Wang, Wenbin Li, Hongbing Pan
arXiv:2610. 29845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots operating in dense crowds and cluttered sites require $360^\circ$ perception to react to surrounding hazards.
By Samuel Foo Enze, Manthan Patel, Fan Yang, Linus Kramer, Pascal Roth, Marco Hutter, Cesar Cadena
AerialDojo-200K is a large-scale benchmark suite for open-world aerial object-goal search, featuring 42 simulation scenes across four families and 21 types, including urban, natural, infrastructure, and disaster environments. The dataset contains 205,732 task instances—over 100K semantic-goal and over 100K image-goal tasks—each with a collision-free reference trajectory and multi-view video recordings. A unified evaluation framework splits scenes into 21 in-distribution and 21 out-of-distribution sets, and preliminary tests on multimodal large language models show significant room for improvement in general-purpose aerial agents.
By Tongtong Feng, Xin Wang, Haoran Hou, Ren Wang, Weiran Wang, Shaokai Zhu, Ziqi Jia, Hao Wang, Yu-Wei Zhan, Zongyuan Wu, Jinghao Cui, Wenwu Zhu
arXiv:2606. 29783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-based aerial tracking is critical in GPS-denied environments.
By Yan Miao, Karteek Gandiboyina, Noah Giles, Hideki Okamoto, Bardh Hoxha, Georgios Fainekos, Sayan Mitra
arXiv:2611.07705v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Optical flow is an important cue for drone analysis in aerial surveillance, airspace monitoring, and long-range target tracking, where motion remains i...
By Laurenz Ruzicka, Roman Pflugfelder, Daniel Cremers
arXiv:2609.22897v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable recognition beyond a fixed class set, but their computational demands prevent them from running on many ed...
By Mohammad Mehdi Rastikerdar, Hui Guan, Deepak Ganesan
WorkIng is a dual-domain benchmark for autonomous navigation in highway work zones, offering a real-world dataset (WorkIng-Highway) with 360° multi‑modal sensor data and over 12,000 annotated frames, and a synthetic counterpart (WorkIng-CARLA) that simulates 24 regulation‑aware scenarios across six topologies and traffic standards. The benchmark includes 227,399 tracked 3D bounding boxes and 100+ custom 3D assets. Experiments show that real‑world data drives performance, while scenario‑stratified synthetic augmentation improves 2D recognition, 3D detection, and trajectory planning.
By Xujun Xie, Dominik R\"o{\ss}le, Adithya Mohan, Daniel Cremers, Torsten Sch\"on
arXiv:2607. 07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical.
By Erik Jagnandan, Mulugeta Haile, Gregory Barber, Pratik Chaudhari
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...
By Boao Yu, Zimo Chen, Junreng Rao, Yue Hu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yong Zhao, Rusheng Ju
arXiv:2606. 06147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise in UAV navigation.
By Shengtao Zheng, Kai Li, Weichen Zhang, Yu Meng, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li, Xiao-Ping Zhang