Aerial Robotics

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Overview

Aerial robotics develops flying machines—from multirotors and fixed-wing aircraft to flapping-wing and hybrid robots—and the methods that let them sense, move, and interact with the world. Work combines onboard perception and state estimation with model-based planning and control, including model predictive control, visual servoing, and robust control; reinforcement learning and vision-language-action models are increasingly used for navigation, tracking, and manipulation. Researchers also study cooperative swarms, aerial transport, landing, and contact tasks, evaluating systems in simulation and benchmarks as well as on real robots with limited power, computing, and sensing. A central challenge is making learning-based autonomy generalize from simulation to changing real conditions while preserving safety, reliability, and real-time performance.

Latest papers

CardsList

343 papers38 papers in the last four weeks, down 24% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. A Two-Wheeled Quadrotor with All-Clockwise Tilted Rotors for Level-Attitude Surface Locomotnion

    Oct 29, 2026Takumi Ito, Satoshi NakanoAerial RoboticsRobot Locomotion

    National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) · Nagoya Institute of Technology

  2. CAPTURER: A Dexterous Aerial Manipulator for Dynamic and Precise Grasping across Diverse Environments

    Oct 29, 2026Meng Wang, Jindou Jia, Sicheng Zhou +4Aerial RoboticsRobotic Grasping

    School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang, Singapore +3

  3. Selective Sliding Mode Control Enhances Robustness of Aerial Robots Under Disturbances

    Oct 28, 2026Anoop Kiran, Thales C. Silva, Nora AyanianQuadrotor ControlAerial Robotics

    School of Engineering and Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA

  4. Autonomous fixed-wing interception using reinforcement learning

    Oct 27, 2026Daan van Hamersveld, Ewoud Smeur, Iurii KriachkoAerial RoboticsRL Control

  5. Acoustic Signature Optimisation for Bioinspired Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

    Oct 27, 2026Yi Lun Duh, Krispin C. V. Broers, Sophie F. ArmaniniAerial RoboticsBioinspired Robotics

  6. RAVEN: A Unified Active SLAM System for Rapid Autonomous Visual Exploration with Aerial Robots under Localization Uncertainty

    Oct 27, 2026Xinyi Chen, Yichen Zhang, Chenxing Jiang +1Simultaneous Localization and MappingAutonomous Robot Exploration

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

  7. Omni-IGN: Onboard Image-Goal Navigation for Drones with Omnidirectional Vision

    Oct 27, 2026Zichen Yan, Rui Huang, Shenao Wang +3UAV NavigationImage-Goal Navigation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

  8. Nonlinear Control of Aerial Manipulator

    Oct 25, 2026Sandesh ThapaAerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Control, Robotics & Automation Lab (CoRAL), Spring 2017 Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma

  9. Sybil-Resilient Multi-Drone Exploration of Indoor and Confined Spaces

    Oct 24, 2026Shyaam Mahesh, Aditya B Prakash, Rubal Sagwal +1Resilient Multi-Robot CoordinationMulti-Agent System Security

  10. HARP: Handoff-Aware Recovery Planning for Active Target Acquisition in Multi-UAV Handoff

    Oct 24, 2026Heegyeong Kim, Alice James, Avishkar Seth +2Aerial RoboticsMulti-Robot Motion Planning

  11. UAV-SwarmAgent: Scalable Multi-UAV Reconnaissance and Task Allocation via Code Generation and Vision-Language Reasoning

    Oct 23, 2026Oleg Sautenkov, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa +3Aerial RoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia · AiRo Lab, Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

  12. Adaptive Aerial Loco-Manipulation Policy Learning via LLM-Assisted Proactive Task Generation

    Oct 22, 2026Jingyu Ru, Xiangyuan Xie, Lixuan Jin +8Aerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · National Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China +1

  13. Learning Geometry-Aware Planning Representations for Monocular Flight with Cross-Modal Supervision

    Oct 19, 2026Wencan Feng, Bailing Tian, Yulin Hui +2UAV NavigationAerial Robotics

    School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China.

  14. Vehicle-State-Aware Confidence Estimation for Direct Wind Sensing on a Multirotor

    Oct 19, 2026Sri Arjun Senthil Kumar, April Zi Qian Chan, Chen-Hua YeowConfidence EstimationAdaptive Sensing

  15. Self-Crystallizing Behavior Trees: Amortizing Foundation-Model Reasoning into Deterministic Control for Autonomous Drones

    Oct 18, 2026Behnam MoradiBehavior TreesRobot Policy Adaptation

    Software Department, KavAI. California, USA

  16. TransNav: Transformer-Based End-to-End Navigation Method for Static and Dynamic Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance

    Oct 16, 2026Jianghan Zhu, Zhuo Li, Yanjun Zhang +1Robot NavigationAerial Robotics

    The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

  17. SkyAgent: Revisable Target Memory for Continuous Aerial Search

    Oct 16, 2026Kaibo Yang, Xingyu Wu, Enze Zhu +6Aerial RoboticsUAV Navigation

    Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT) · School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

  18. CBF-Based Control Allocation for Omnidirectional Tiltrotor Aerial Robots

    Oct 15, 2026Seobeom Lee, Hyondong OhAerial RoboticsControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

  19. FPV-CRASH: A Dataset for Offline Crash Moment Localization in Drone First-Person-View Videos

    Oct 14, 2026Jifan Zhang, Tingyu Wang, Qian Liu +1Temporal Action LocalizationAerial Robotics

    School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. · School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. · Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau, China.

  20. An Optimal Algorithm for Changing from Longitudinal to Latitudinal Formation of Autonomous Aircraft Squadrons

    Oct 13, 2026Paulo André Sperandio Giacomin, Elder Moreira HemerlyMulti-Robot Formation ControlAerial Robotics

    Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz Departamento de Ciências Exatas e Tecnológicas - Área de Informática Ilhéus-BA, Brasil · Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica Departamento de Sistemas e Controle - Divisão de Engenharia Eletrônica São José dos Campos-SP, Brasil

  21. Aerodynamic Promptness of Tilting-Propeller Multirotors

    Oct 12, 2026Antonio FranchiAerial Robotics

    Robotics and Mechatronics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. · Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.

  22. Multimodal Sensor-Gated Mid-Air Launch and Vision-Based Recovery of a Child UAV on a Hovering Mothership Drone

    Oct 11, 2026Aashish Sahu, R. Prasanth KumarAerial RoboticsUAV Landing on Moving Platforms

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Kandi, Sangareddy 502284, India · Department of Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Kandi, Sangareddy 502284, India

  23. Stereo-Planner: Learning Stereo-to-Trajectory Planning for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Quadrotor Navigation

    Oct 11, 2026Hongming Shen, Junjie Lu, Xun Chen +4Robot NavigationSim-to-Real Transfer

    The authors are with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · The author is with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China 300072.

  24. C2Flight: A Closed-Loop Co-Simulation Framework for Early-Stage Evaluation of Heterogeneous UAV Computing Systems

    Oct 10, 2026Xizhu Chen, Shuyuan Zhang, Yixuan Li +4Heterogeneous ComputingHardware-Software Co-Design

  25. Cooperative Aerial Transportation of a Payload with a Sliding Cable Attachment

    Oct 9, 2026Sebastian Tilaguy Lezama, Diego S D'AntonioAerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    Distributed Multi-Agent Robotic Systems (∆MARS Lab), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA

  26. Prediction-Informed Landing Window Planning for UAV Landing on USV in High Sea States

    Oct 9, 2026Kaizhen Li, Xi Zhou, Dan Zhang +1UAV Landing on Moving PlatformsAerial Robotics

    School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation Shanghai University Shanghai, China

  27. An Embodied Multiagent Framework Based on Token Communications for Cooperative ISAC

    Oct 8, 2026Jiahe Guo, Jun Du, Chunxiao Jiang +1Integrated Sensing and CommunicationMulti-Agent Communication

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · State Key Laboratory of Space Network and Communications, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

  28. MultiFly: A Real-World Multimodal Aerial Dataset with Annotation-Efficient Label Transfer and Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency

    Oct 7, 2026Markus Gross, Andreas Greiner, Taehyoung Kim +11Multimodal Semantic SegmentationRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    Autonomous Aerial Systems, Fraunhofer Institute IVI · Computer Vision Group, Technical University of Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) +2

  29. AeroEval: Staged Program and Execution Validation for AI-Generated Drone Missions

    Oct 7, 2026Kautuk Astu, Naina Rabha, Yogesh SimmhanCode Generation EvaluationAerial Robotics

    Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India

  30. trACT: temporal revelation Airborne Camera Trap

    Oct 7, 2026Oliver Bimber, Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Mohamed Youssef +3Aerial RoboticsDrone-Based Wildlife Monitoring

    Department of Computer Science, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria · Institute of Space Research, German Aerospace Center, Berlin, Germany · BOKU University, Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management,, Vienna, Austria +1