AERMANI-PLACE: Language Guided Object Placement with Aerial Manipulators
Authors: Sarthak Mishra, Ritama Sanyal, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Wei Pan, Spandan Roy
Organizations: Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India. · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. · Newcastle University, UK
Abstract
Object placement is a fundamental component of aerial manipulation tasks, yet existing systems typically require the desired placement position to be specified explicitly in metric coordinates. Such interfaces are not intuitive and require users to reason about coordinate frames and scene geometry, making them difficult to use in practical deployments. In contrast, humans often communicate spatial goals through a combination of language and pointing gestures. Inspired by this observation, we present AERMANI-PLACE, a framework for language-guided object placement with aerial manipulators. Given a scene image and a natural language instruction, an image editing model generates a modified version of the scene containing a visual marker that indicates where the object should be placed. This marker is then grounded into the physical environment using depth observations to recover a metric place point, after which a placement trajectory is generated and executed by the aerial manipulator. We evaluate the proposed approach on a test set of 100 language-guided placement tasks and demonstrate successful execution on a real aerial manipulation platform. Experimental results show that the proposed method reliably infers placement locations from language instructions with an average success rate of 87% on the test-set and transfers effectively to real-world aerial manipulation with an average success rate of 72%. Video: https://youtu.be/SgwwgLBsv0g
Precise object placement remains underexplored in aerial manipulation, where most systems rely on predefined target coordinates and focus primarily on grasping and control. Specifying exact placement poses, however, is cumbersome in real-world settings, where users naturally communicate goals through language. In this work, we present AeroPlace-Flow, a training-free framework for language-grounded aerial object placement that unifies visual foresight with explicit 3D geometric reasoning and object flow. Given RGB-D observations of the object and the placement scene, along with a natural language instruction, AeroPlace-Flow first synthesizes a task-complete goal image using image editing models. The imagined configuration is then grounded into metric 3D space through depth alignment and object-centric reasoning, enabling the inference of a collision-aware object flow that transports the grasped object to a language and contact-consistent placement configuration. The resulting motion is executed via standard trajectory tracking for an aerial manipulator. AeroPlace-Flow produces executable placement targets without requiring predefined poses or task-specific training. We validate our approach through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating reliable language-conditioned placement across diverse aerial scenarios with an average success rate of 75% on hardware.
The rapid progress of vision--language models (VLMs) has sparked growing interest in robotic control, where natural language can express the operation goals while visual feedback links perception to action. However, directly deploying VLM-driven policies on aerial manipulators remains unsafe and unreliable since the generated actions are often inconsistent, hallucination-prone, and dynamically infeasible for flight. In this work, we present AERMANI-VLM, the first framework to adapt pretrained VLMs for aerial manipulation by separating high-level reasoning from low-level control, without any task-specific fine-tuning. Our framework encodes natural language instructions, task context, and safety constraints into a structured prompt that guides the model to generate a step-by-step reasoning trace in natural language. This reasoning output is used to select from a predefined library of discrete, flight-safe skills, ensuring interpretable and temporally consistent execution. By decoupling symbolic reasoning from physical action, AERMANI-VLM mitigates hallucinated commands and prevents unsafe behavior, enabling robust task completion. We validate the framework in both simulation and hardware on diverse multi-step pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to previously unseen commands, objects, and environments.
Perceiving human motion and intent at long range is a prerequisite for socially intelligent aerial robots, yet the data to learn it barely exists. We introduce Drones2BodyLanguage, a dataset grounding human motion in real UAV footage: avatars manifesting ten communicative intents are placed into unmodified 4K drone scenes with metrically correct position, scale and orientation, maintained over hundreds of frames of camera motion. Enabling it is a lightweight geometric world model of the local scene - semantically selected anchors lifted to 3D through streaming monocular depth - in which a placement point is predicted as an affine anchor combination with provably rigid-invariant weights, and re-rendered under an SVD-fitted ground rotation. Across twelve architectures on scene- and motion-disjoint splits, training on placed data lifts mean intent accuracy by a wide margin for real, retargeted and generated motion alike, with gains confirmed on two in-the-wild scenes.