UAV Navigation

UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

UAV navigation studies how drones estimate their position, understand nearby space, and choose motions to reach goals while avoiding obstacles and respecting vehicle limits. State estimation commonly uses visual-inertial or LiDAR-inertial odometry, sometimes combined with satellite imagery, semantic maps, or other sensors when GNSS is unavailable. Planners range from model predictive control, graph search, and trajectory optimization to reinforcement learning and vision-language-action models that follow natural-language goals; safety filters and control barrier functions are often used to constrain motion. A central challenge is making these systems reliable in unfamiliar, dynamic conditions while balancing safety, speed, energy use, onboard computation, and transfer from simulation to real flight.

Latest papers

272 papers38 papers in the last four weeks, up 27% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Safer Trajectory Planning with CBF-guided Diffusion Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Apr 19, 2026Peiwen Yang, Shiyu Bai, Weisong Wen +2Diffusion Model Guidance UAV Navigation
Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Shepherding UAV Swarm with Action Prediction Based on Movement Constraints
Apr 19, 2026Yusuke Tsunoda, Yusuke Goto, Takao SatoSwarm Robotics UAV Navigation
Graduate School of Engineering, University of Hyogo, Hyogo, Japan
FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation
Apr 17, 2026Dian Shao, Zhengzheng Xu, Peiyang Wang +4Zero-Shot Learning UAV Navigation
Northwestern Polytechnical University · Nanjing University
Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap
Apr 15, 2026Hanxuan Chen, Jie Zheng, Siqi Yang +9Vision-Language Navigation Aerial VLN
Autel Robotics, Shenzhen, China · School of Intelligent Software and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA +3
Learning step-level dynamic soaring in shear flow
Apr 14, 2026Lunbing Chen, Jixin Lu, Yufei Yin +3Feedback Control UAV Navigation
J.C.Wu Center for Aerodynamics, School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, PR China
AWARE: Adaptive Whole-body Active Rotating Control for Enhanced LiDAR-Inertial Odometry under Human-in-the-Loop Interaction
Apr 12, 2026Yizhe Zhang, Jianping Li, Liangliang Yin +2UAV Navigation LiDAR Odometry
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore
"Take Me Home, Wi-Fi Drone": A Drone-based Wireless System for Wilderness Search and Rescue
Apr 10, 2026Weiying Hou, Luca Jiang-Tao Yu, Chenshu WuSearch-and-Rescue Robotics Wireless Localization
The University of Hong Kong
HTNav: A Hybrid Navigation Framework with Tiered Structure for Urban Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation
Apr 10, 2026Chengjie Fan, Cong Pan, Zijian Liu +2Visual Navigation Robot Navigation
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence Technology, Ministry of Education, China
Vision-Language Navigation for Aerial Robots: Towards the Era of Large Language Models
Apr 9, 2026Xingyu Xia, Lekai Zhou, Yujie Tang +3Vision-Language Navigation Aerial VLN
Defense Innovation Institute, Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing 10071, China · Intelligent Game and Decision Laboratory, Beijing 100071, China · Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Precise Aggressive Aerial Maneuvers with Sensorimotor Policies
Apr 7, 2026Tianyue Wu, Guangtong Xu, Zihan Wang +6UAV Navigation Quadrotor Control
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou, China. · Differential Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, China.
LSGS-Loc: Towards Robust 3DGS-Based Visual Localization for Large-Scale UAV Scenarios
Apr 7, 2026Xiang Zhang, Tengfei Wang, Fang Xu +2Map-Based Localization 3D Gaussian Splatting
School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, China PR.
EDFNet: Early Fusion of Edge and Depth for Thin-Obstacle Segmentation in UAV Navigation
Apr 6, 2026Negar FathiThin-Structure Segmentation Multimodal Semantic Segmentation
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
Vision-Based End-to-End Learning for UAV Traversal of Irregular Gaps via Differentiable Simulation
Apr 3, 2026Linzuo Zhang, Yu Hu, Feng Yu +3UAV Navigation Vision-Based Robot Control
The authors are with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Unifying UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization via 3D Geometric Perception
Apr 2, 2026Haoyuan Li, Wen Yang, Fang Xu +4Cross-View Geo-Localization GNSS-Denied Localization
School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization and the Key Laboratory of Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China +1
Satellite-Free Training for Drone-View Geo-Localization
Apr 2, 2026Tao Liu, Yingzhi Zhang, Xingrun Wang +2Cross-View Geo-Localization UAV Navigation
Nanjing University of Science and Technology Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · University of Tsukuba Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan · Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore
PanoAir: A Panoramic Visual-Inertial SLAM with Cross-Time Real-World UAV Dataset
Apr 1, 2026Yiyang Wu, Xiaohu Zhang, Yanjin Du +5Visual-Inertial SLAM UAV Navigation
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China.
A Self-Rotating Tri-Rotor UAV for Field of View Expansion and Autonomous Flight
Mar 30, 2026Xiaobin Zhou, Zihao Zheng, Aoxu Jin +2Aerial Robotics UAV Navigation
School of Robotics and Automation, Nanjing University, Suzhou, 215163, China.
LLM-Enabled Low-Altitude UAV Natural Language Navigation via Signal Temporal Logic Specification Translation and Repair
Mar 29, 2026Yuqi Ping, Huahao Ding, Tianhao Liang +6UAV Navigation Robot Navigation
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Space-Aerial Networking and Intelligent Sensing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Information Systems Technology and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372 · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China +1
An End-to-end Flight Control Network for High-speed UAV Obstacle Avoidance based on Event-Depth Fusion
Mar 28, 2026Dikai Shang, Jingyue Zhao, Shi Xu +2UAV Navigation Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
Shanghai jiaotong University, Shanghai 200240, China · Defense Innovation Institute, AMS, Beijing 10071, China
Path-Following Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Bounded Lateral Acceleration
Mar 28, 2026Vinay Kathiriya, Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan KumarUAV Navigation Robot Trajectory Tracking
Intelligent Systems and Control Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai- 400076, India
Robust Distributed Cooperative Path-Following and Local Replanning for Multi-UAVs Under Differentiated Low-Altitude Paths
Mar 25, 2026Zimao Sheng, Zirui Yu, Hong'an YangDistributed Control UAV Navigation
School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin, China
Beyond Matching to Tiles: Bridging Unaligned Aerial and Satellite Views for Vision-Only UAV Navigation
Mar 23, 2026Kejia Liu, Haoyang Zhou, Ruoyu Xu +3UAV Navigation Cross-View Geo-Localization
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security
LARD 2.0: Enhanced Datasets and Benchmarking for Autonomous Landing Systems
Mar 23, 2026Yassine Bougacha, Geoffrey Delhomme, Mélanie Ducoffe +8Aerial Robotics UAV Navigation
DGA · IRT Saint Exupéry, Toulouse, France · Thales, Toulouse, France +3
SpatialFly: Implicit 3D Prior-Guided Visual Reparameterization for Continuous UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation
Mar 22, 2026Wen Jiang, Kangyao Huang, Li Wang +9Visual Representation Learning 3D Spatial Reasoning
School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Chongqing Innovation Center, Beijing Institute of Technology, Chongqing 401120, China +5
GustPilot: A Hierarchical DRL-INDI Framework for Wind-Resilient Quadrotor Navigation
Mar 20, 2026Amir Atef Habel, Roohan Ahmed Khan, Fawad Mehboob +2UAV Navigation Quadrotor Control
Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Center for Digital Engineering, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia.
HUGE-Bench: A Benchmark for High-Level UAV Vision-Language-Action Tasks
Mar 20, 2026Jingyu Guo, Ziye Chen, Ziwen Li +7UAV Navigation Vision-Language-Action Models
1The University of Melbourne, Australia · 2Melsy Tech, China · 3MBZUAI, United Arab Emirates +1
Perception-Aware Autonomous Exploration in Feature-Limited Environments
Mar 16, 2026Moji Shi, Rajitha de Silva, Hang Yu +2UAV Navigation UAV Trajectory Optimization
MAVLab, TU Delft, Netherlands · Lincoln Center for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK
EAAE: Energy-Aware Autonomous Exploration for UAVs in Unknown 3D Environments
Mar 16, 2026Jacob Elskamp, Moji Shi, Leonard Bauersfeld +2Mobile Robotics UAV Navigation
Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands · Institute for Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
AerialVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Navigation via Minimalist End-to-End Control
Mar 15, 2026Peng Xu, Zhengnan Deng, Jiayan Deng +2Closed-Loop Control of VLA Models UAV Navigation
Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, China · Department of Computer Science, Hofstra University, Hempstead, USA
AeroGen: Structured Prompting for Low-Code Drone-as-a-Service Mission Composition
Mar 15, 2026Kautuk Astu, Yogesh SimmhanLLM-Based Program Synthesis LLM Code Generation
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012 India

Apr 19, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Safer Trajectory Planning with CBF-guided Diffusion Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Peiwen Yang, Shiyu Bai, Weisong Wen, Yixin Gao+1

Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Diffusion Model Guidance UAV Navigation Robot Motion Generation Safe Motion Planning

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Safe and agile trajectory planning is essential for autonomous systems, especially during complex aerobatic maneuvers. Motivated by the recent success of diffusion models in generative tasks, this paper introduces AeroTrajGen, a novel framework for diffusion-based trajectory generation that incorporates control barrier function (CBF)-guided sampling during inference, specifically designed for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed CBF-guided sampling addresses two critical challenges: (1) mitigating the inherent unpredictability and potential safety violations of diffusion models, and (2) reducing reliance on extensively safety-verified training data. During the reverse diffusion process, CBF-based guidance ensures collision-free trajectories by seamlessly integrating safety constraint gradients with the diffusion model's score function. The model features an obstacle-aware diffusion transformer architecture with multi-modal conditioning, including trajectory history, obstacles, maneuver styles, and goal, enabling the generation of smooth, highly agile trajectories across 14 distinct aerobatic maneuvers. Trained on a dataset of 2,000 expert demonstrations, AeroTrajGen is rigorously evaluated in simulation under multi-obstacle environments. Simulation results demonstrate that CBF-guided sampling reduces collision rates by 94.7% compared to unguided diffusion baselines, while preserving trajectory agility and diversity. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/RoboticsPolyu/CBF-DMP.