Optimal Path Planning with Localization constraints

Vision-language models (VLMs) can generate routes directly from aerial imagery for off-road navigation, but their predictions provide no indication of reliability. We present UDAV, an Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive VLM Waypoint Planner for UAV-guided UGV navigation. UDAV draws multiple stochastic trajectory predictions, selects their medoid as a self-consistent nominal route, and estimates predictive uncertainty from their spatial dispersion. When the maximum uncertainty across interior waypoints exceeds a threshold, UDAV invokes a reconsideration stage; otherwise, it returns the medoid directly. We evaluate UDAV on 400 held-out trajectory queries from two UAV flights. Stochastic medoid selection reduces the mean average displacement error (ADE) from 147.4 pixels for a deterministic prediction to 115.9 pixels. The complete planner achieves a mean ADE of 110.4 pixels, a 25.1% reduction relative to deterministic planning, while producing valid trajectories for all queries. UDAV also yields the lowest 90th- and 95th-percentile errors among all evaluated configurations, including a higher-budget K=10 consensus baseline. Relative to the K=5 medoid, UDAV reduces these errors from 225.3 and 326.0 pixels to 199.0 and 290.8 pixels, respectively. These results demonstrate that stochastic VLM predictions provide both a stronger nominal route and an actionable uncertainty signal for selectively mitigating large planning errors.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for exploration-driven monitoring in hazardous environments such as disaster zones, contaminated sites, wildfire areas, and damaged infrastructure, where limited flight endurance must be allocated between visiting reported locations and gathering new information. In these settings, prior information regarding hazards is often incomplete, spatially imprecise, and subject to change during execution. For example, initial reports may identify a region where a hazard is likely to exist, but the actual hazard may be displaced, partially observed, or entirely unreported. We present an integrated exploration-aware UAV route optimization and path planning framework for hazard monitoring under uncertain and evolving prior information. The environment is represented as a spatial risk map, where each location has an associated belief of hazardous conditions. Reported hazards are modeled as uncertain regions of interest (ROIs) rather than confirmed target locations, requiring the UAV to inspect reported areas while also using its limited flight endurance to explore informative regions. The proposed method solves a vehicle routing problem over reported ROIs, augments the route with auxiliary pseudo-nodes to improve spatial coverage, allocates the remaining flight distance budget across route segments, and optimizes dynamically feasible B-spline trajectories for local exploration. During execution, UAV measurements update a grid-based belief map, and the remaining trajectory is replanned when new information and the remaining budget justify adaptation. Across 48 scenario configurations, online replanning improves average KL reduction by 15.9% over the offline optimized planner and 48.6% over straight-line traversal.

This work presents a motion planning framework for UAV navigation in non-convex urban air corridors. The planner is based on a mixed-integer tracking model predictive control formulation that enforces corridor feasibility and dynamic consistency within a single optimization problem. To guarantee convergence to the target and mitigate the occurrence of local minima induced by non-convex geometry, a shortest-path-based offset cost with feasibility constraints is embedded directly into the planning problem. Numerical simulations show that the proposed formulation generates dynamically valid trajectories that satisfy the corridor constraints and converge to the target without relying on external global planning stages.