Symmetry-Aware Surrogate-Assisted Testing of UAVs

We investigate a symmetry-aware surrogate-assisted testing approach for UAV autopilots. The proposed approach exploits geometric symmetries between flight missions by trans- forming obstacle configurations into a shared canonical coordi- nate frame. This enables a neural-network surrogate trained on a single reference mission to be reused across arbitrary missions, reducing the amount of high-fidelity simulation data required for training. The surrogate model is trained to predict the minimum clearance distance between a UAV and surrounding obstacles and is used to guide test generation towards safety-critical scenarios. We evaluate this approach using the Aerialist UAV test bench and benchmark its performance against techniques from the 2024 to 2026 UAV Testing Competitions. Results show that the approach achieves an average critical-test-case hit rate of 42% across the evaluated missions, compared with approximately 10% for the constrained-random baseline used to generate the training data. This approach also achieves high input diversity and competitive benchmark performance. However, our findings reveal limitations in transferring surrogate predictions across missions with differing flight-path characteristics, highlighting the boundaries of geometric canonicalization. To support reproducibility and future research, we provide the trained surrogate model and a dataset comprising more than 2,500 high-fidelity simulations.