arXiv:2607. 08359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs.
By Xueke Zhu, Qingyan Meng, Liutao Yu, Wei Zhang, Zhengyu Ma, Huihui Zhou, Yonghong Tian
The paper introduces CalfVO, a monocular visual odometry system that operates without camera intrinsics, test‑time optimization, bundle adjustment, or loop closure. Using a transformer, it predicts relative poses with separate rotation and translation confidences over overlapping image windows, then aggregates these predictions via a confidence‑weighted module to produce a single trajectory. CalfVO achieves the highest accuracy among calibration‑free methods across five benchmarks and runs at 53 FPS, outperforming all baselines.
By Vladimir Yugay, Duy-Kien Nguyen, Theo Gevers, Cees G. M. Snoek, Martin R. Oswald
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.
The paper introduces a minimalist visual-inertial odometry system that uses only four downward-facing photodiodes with optical Gabor masks and an IMU to estimate motion for differential-drive robots. By jointly optimizing mask parameters and a Temporal Convolutional Network in a physically-grounded simulator, the model decodes speed from the photodiode signals and combines it with IMU angular speed to produce a continuous planar trajectory. Experiments on a prototype robot across indoor and outdoor terrains show that the system closely follows reference trajectories without real-world fine-tuning.
By Francesco Pasti, Jeremy Klotz, Nicola Bellotto, Shree K. Nayar
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:2506. 22174v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The transport industry has recently shown significant interest in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), specifically for port and inland waterway transport.
By Bavo Lesy, Siemen Herremans, Robin Kerstens, Jan Steckel, Walter Daems, Siegfried Mercelis, Ali Anwar