UAV Navigation

UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

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25 papers in the last four weeks, up 178% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 178

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Generalization of World Models under Environmental Variability for Vision-based Quadrotor Navigation
Jun 3, 2026Luca Zanatta, Grzegorz Malczyk, Kostas AlexisWorld Models for Robotics World Models
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
AgenticDiffusion: Multi-View Reasoning with View-Conditioned Diffusion Planning for Vision-Based UAV Navigation
Jun 2, 2026Faryal Batool, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa, Fawad Mehboob +2Aerial Robotics Trajectory Generation
AgenticRL: Self-Refining Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Conditioned UAV Navigation
Jun 2, 2026Roohan Ahmed Khan, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Amir Atef Habel +2RL for Robotics Agentic RL
AirDreamer: Generalist Drone Navigation with World Models
Jun 2, 2026Zian Liu, Andong Yang, Chunkai Yang +3RL for Robotics World Models for Robotics
Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
Towards Precise Intent-Aligned VLA Aerial Navigation via Expert-Guided GRPO
Jun 1, 2026Tianyang Chen, Wenjun Li, Xin zhou +2UAV Navigation Group Relative Policy Optimization
1Zhejiang University · 2Differential Robotics
ImagineUAV: Aerial Vision-Language Navigation via World-Action Modeling and Kinodynamic Planning
May 31, 2026Xuchen Liu, Jiawei Huang, Shihao Xia +3UAV Navigation Vision-Language Navigation
Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China · School of Computer Science and Cyber Engineering, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
DINO-GFSA: Geo-Localization via Semantic Gated Fusion and Mamba-based Sequential Aggregation
May 30, 2026Beier Hu, Yuanshen Guo, Jialu Cai +4Cross-View Geo-Localization UAV Navigation
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China
SkyShield: Occupancy as a Safety Interface for Low-Altitude UAV Autonomy
May 30, 2026Jie Gao, Jie Ma, Kaihui Lin +4Aerial Robotics UAV Navigation
1Xiamen University · 2Jiangxi Academy of Sciences
Integrated Exploration-Aware UAV Route Optimization and Path Planning
May 27, 2026Jimin Choi, Grant Stagg, Cameron K. Peterson +1Belief-Space Planning Trajectory Optimization
Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA · Department of Electrical Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA · Department of Aerospace Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
PEACE: A Planner-Executor Agent with Constraint Enforcement for UAVs
May 26, 2026Erdem Uysal, Timo Kehrer, Sebastiano PanichellaLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Foundation Models
Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
NightSight: Passive Computation for Navigation in Dark Using Events
May 25, 2026Deepak Singh, Brijan Vaghasiya, Shreyas Khobragade +1Event-Based Vision Depth Estimation
Perception and Autonomous Robotics (PeAR) Group Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, USA
OPAL: Omnidirectional Path-efficient Aerial 3D expLoration
May 25, 2026Yoga Satwik Chappidi, Avideh ZakhorAerial Robotics Mobile Robotics
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Vision-Guided Outdoor Flight and Obstacle Evasion via Reinforcement Learning
May 23, 2026Shiladitya Dutta, Aayush Gupta, Varun Saran +1RL for Robotics UAV Navigation
College of Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California Berkeley
Semantic-Aware Guided Drone Exploration for Language-Conditioned 3D Indoor Mapping
May 22, 2026Nitin Vegesna, Avideh ZakhorAerial Robotics UAV Navigation
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA
KIO-planner: Attention-Guided Single-Stage Motion Planning with Dual Mapping for UAV Navigation
May 19, 2026Dexing Yao, Haochen Li, Junhao Wei +11Constrained Motion Planning Kinodynamic Motion Planning
Faculty of Applied Sciences Macao Polytechnic University Macao, China · College of Animal Science and Technology Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering Guangzhou, China · School of Economics and Management South China Normal University Macao, China +1
FlyMirage: A Fully Automated Generation Pipeline for Diverse and Scalable UAV Flight Data via Generative World Model
May 19, 2026Jinhan Li, Xijie Huang, Weiqi Gai +9UAV Navigation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. · Differential Robotics, Hangzhou 311121, China.
Aerial Inspection Behaviors via RL-based Quadrotor Control for Under-canopy Forest Environments
May 19, 2026Fausto Mauricio Lagos Suarez, Akshit Saradagi, Vidya Sumathy +2RL Control Robot Trajectory Tracking
Robotics and AI group, in the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering at Luleåa University of Technology, Sweden
CosFly: Plan in the Matrix, Fly in the World
May 18, 2026Hanxuan Chen, Xiangyue Wang, Songsheng Cheng +8Trajectory Generation UAV Navigation
Autel Robotics · Nanjing University · Peking University +2
Learned Memory Attenuation in Sage-Husa Kalman Filters for Robust UAV State Estimation
May 18, 2026Kenan Majewski, Marcin ŻugajKalman Filtering UAV Navigation
Institute of Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics, Warsaw University of Technology, Nowowiejska 24, Warsaw, 00-665, Poland
CaMeRL: Collision-Aware and Memory-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for UAV Navigation in Multi-Scale Obstacle Environments
May 14, 2026Hong Hong, Feiyu Liao, Yongheng Liang +3RL for Robotics Reinforcement Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, and the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing, Guangzhou, China
Loiter UAV Reinsertion Guidance for Fixed-wing UAV Corridors
May 13, 2026Pradeep J, Kedarisetty Siddhardha, Ashwini RatnooCollision Avoidance UAV Navigation
B.Tech (Honours) Student, Department of Mechatronics Engineering · Assistant Professor, Department of Mechatronics Engineering · Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering
LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration
May 13, 2026Jonathan A. Diller, Fernando Cladera, Camillo J. Taylor +1Trajectory Generation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning
GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania
Uncertainty-Aware 3D Position Refinement for Multi-UAV Systems
May 13, 2026Hosam Alamleh, Damir PulatovMulti-Robot Systems UAV Navigation
Computer Science University of North Carolina Wilmington Wilmington, North Carolina, USA
Galilean State Estimation for Inertial Navigation Systems with Unknown Time Delay
May 13, 2026Giulio Delama, Martin Scheiber, Yixiao Ge +3UAV Navigation Robot State Estimation
Control of Networked Systems Group University of Klagenfurt 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria · Systems Theory and Robotics Group Australian National University ACT, 2601, Australia · I3S, CNRS, Universit´e Cˆote d’Azur and Institut Universitaire de France 06900 Sophia Antipolis, France
Hierarchical LLM-Driven Control for HAPS-Assisted UAV Networks: Joint Optimization of Flight and Connectivity
May 12, 2026Zijiang Yan, Hao Zhou, Wael Jaafar +4Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Language Model-Based Control
ASIP-Planner: Adaptive Planning for UAV Surface Inspection in Partially Known Indoor Environments
May 11, 2026Hanyu Jin, Zhefan Xu, Haoyu Shen +3Next-Best-View Planning UAV Navigation
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Safe Aerial 3D Path Planning for Autonomous UAVs using Magnetic Potential Fields
May 11, 2026Haechan Mark Bong, Giovanni BeltrameUAV Navigation Convolutional Autoencoder
Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, QC., Canada. · MILA, QC., Canada.
A Cross-Layered Multi-Drone Coordination for Medical Supply Delivery during Disaster Response Management
May 10, 2026Aneesh Calyam, Subrahmanya Chandra Bhamidipati, Zack Murry +1Aerial Robotics UAV Navigation
University of Missouri–Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
AERO-VIS: Asynchronous Event-based Real-time Onboard Visual-Inertial SLAM
May 8, 2026Yannick Burkhardt, Sebastián Barbas Laina, Simon Boche +2Event-Based Vision UAV Navigation
Mobile Robotics Lab, ETH Zürich · Technical University of Munich · Munich Center for Machine Lerning (MCML) +1
Palm-sized Omnidirectional Vision-Based UAV Exploration with Sparse Topological Map Guidance
May 8, 2026Zirui Wang, Xinjia Luo, Haotian Sun +3Robot Navigation UAV Navigation
Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China

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Generalization of World Models under Environmental Variability for Vision-based Quadrotor Navigation

Luca Zanatta, Grzegorz Malczyk, Kostas Alexis

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

World Models for Robotics World Models Sim-to-Real Transfer UAV Navigation Latent World Models World Model Evaluation

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World models, learned generative models that predict how an environment evolves, have become a promising tool for sample-efficient robot learning. Yet how robust they are to environmental variability remains poorly understood. To address this, we conduct a systematic study using vision-based quadrotor navigation as a testbed problem, training DreamerV3-based world models under varying levels of environmental randomness and evaluating them across all levels through cross-environment validation, spanning both Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) pretraining and Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning. We then deploy all world models and associated navigation policies on a real quadrotor in unseen environments, including an open-loop run where the model receives just 2.5s of real sensory input before all sensors are cut off, leaving the system to navigate entirely in imagination over a 12m traverse. Our results show that world model robustness during SSL pretraining is a strong predictor of sim-to-real transfer: every model that generalized well in cross-environment SSL validation deployed successfully in the real world, passing through gaps as narrow as 0.67m, whereas the model that dominated simulation policy evaluation failed on the real platform. We further identify (a) the discrete latent size and (b) the training-sequence length as the dominant factors governing world model quality.

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Latest papers 178