arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Jul 9

Vision Language Action (VLA) Models for Unmanned Aerial Robotics and Bimanual Manipulation: A Review

arXiv:2607. 06706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Action (VLA) models unify visual perception, natural-language understanding, and action generation within a single foundation model, allowing a robot to follow instructions such as fold the towel or fly to the red building directly from camera images.

By Inkyu Sa, Chanoh Park, Hea-Min Lee, Donghee Noh, Ho Seok Ahn
arXiv AI
Aug 11

RecoverFly: A Failure-Aware Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

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 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 Machine Learning
Jun 3

PerchRL: Vision-Based Agile Perching on Inclined Platforms under Rapid and Irregular Motion

arXiv:2606. 03441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vision-based perching of quadrotors on moving inclined platforms is critical for air-ground collaboration but remains challenging due to the limited field of view (FOV).

By Zihong Lu, Zongzhuo Liu, Huaxu Li, Jinqiang Cui, Jie Mei, Youmin Gong, U Kei Cheang, Boyu Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 18

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

arXiv:2606. 20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly.

By Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Yantian Shen, Zhikun Hu, Hongjun Wang, Yang Yang, Xindi Wang, Jiande Sun
arXiv AI
Jul 14

ActiveFly-Bench: Aligning Embodied Question Answering with Vision-Language-Action for Aerial Embodied Perception

arXiv:2607. 10180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce ActiveFly-Bench, the first benchmark to bridge cyberspace reasoning and physical-world interaction for UAV embodied perception.

By Weichen Zhang, Shiquan Yu, Yinan Zhu, Peizhi Tang, Shilong Ji, Zhiyuan Deng, Tianyi Lyu, Haoyang Wang, Xin Zeng, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen