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Related papers: Towards Autonomous UAV Visual Object Search in Cit…

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This paper tackles the challenge of autonomous target search using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex unknown environments. To fill the gap in systematic approaches for this task, we introduce Star-Searcher, an aerial system…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Yiming Luo , Zixuan Zhuang , Neng Pan , Chen Feng , Shaojie Shen , Fei Gao , Hui Cheng , Boyu Zhou

The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures…

The ability to efficiently plan and execute automated and precise search missions using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during emergency response situations is imperative. Precise navigation between obstacles and time-efficient searching of…

This paper considers the problem of searching for a point of interest (POI) moving along an urban road network with an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV is modeled as a variable-speed Dubins vehicle with a line-of-sight sensor in an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Collin Hague , Artur Wolek

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments using onboard visual observation. This task holds promise for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Huilin Xu , Zhuoyang Liu , Yixiang Luomei , Feng Xu

Aerial outdoor semantic navigation requires robots to explore large, unstructured environments to locate target objects. Recent advances in semantic navigation have demonstrated open-set object-goal navigation in indoor settings, but these…

Current methods of deploying robots that operate in dynamic, uncertain environments, such as Uncrewed Aerial Systems in search \& rescue missions, require nearly continuous human supervision for vehicle guidance and operation. These methods…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Hunter M. Ray , Zakariya Laouar , Zachary Sunberg , Nisar Ahmed

Language-goal aerial navigation requires UAVs to localize targets in the complex outdoors, such as urban blocks based on textual instructions. The indoor methods are often hard to scale to urban scenes due to ambiguous objects, limited…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Haotian Xu , Yue Hu , Chen Gao , Zhengqiu Zhu , Yong Zhao , Yong Li , Quanjun Yin

Aerospace embodied intelligence aims to empower unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aerospace platforms to achieve autonomous perception, cognition, and action, as well as egocentric active interaction with humans and the environment.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Fanglong Yao , Yuanchang Yue , Youzhi Liu , Xian Sun , Kun Fu

This paper studies optimal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) placement to ensure line-of-sight (LOS) communication and sensing for a cluster of ground users possibly in deep shadow, while the UAV maintains backhaul connectivity with a base…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-04 Yuanshuai Zheng , Junting Chen

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to develop agents capable of navigating in realistic environments. While recent cross-modal training approaches have significantly improved navigation performance in both indoor and outdoor…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jungdae Lee , Taiki Miyanishi , Shuhei Kurita , Koya Sakamoto , Daichi Azuma , Yutaka Matsuo , Nakamasa Inoue

Depth completion and object detection are two crucial tasks often used for aerial 3D mapping, path planning, and collision avoidance of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Common solutions include using measurements from a LiDAR sensor;…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Sara Hatami Gazani , Fardad Dadboud , Miodrag Bolic , Iraj Mantegh , Homayoun Najjaran

Consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that searches for an unknown number of targets at unknown positions in 3D space. A particle filter uses imperfect measurements about the targets to update an intensity function that represents the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Bilal Yousuf , Zsofia Lendek , Lucian Busoniu

In this work, our goal is to extend the existing search and rescue paradigm by allowing teams of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collaborate effectively with human searchers on the ground. We derive a framework that includes a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Barnabas Gavin Cangan , Larkin Heintzman , Amanda Hashimoto , Nicole Abaid , Ryan K. Williams

To carry out autonomous 3D scanning and online reconstruction of unknown indoor scenes, one has to find a balance between global exploration of the entire scene and local scanning of the objects within it. In this work, we propose a novel…

Graphics · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Ligang Liu , Xi Xia , Han Sun , Qi Shen , Juzhan Xu , Bin Chen , Hui Huang , Kai Xu

Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Juan Sandino , Peter A. Caccetta , Conrad Sanderson , Frederic Maire , Felipe Gonzalez

Pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising foundation for generalist robot policies, but often produce brittle behaviors or unsafe failures when deployed zero-shot in out-of-distribution scenarios. We present…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Cyrus Neary , Omar G. Younis , Artur Kuramshin , Ozgur Aslan , Glen Berseth

Target search with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is relevant problem to many scenarios, e.g., search and rescue (SaR). However, a key challenge is planning paths for maximal search efficiency given flight time constraints. To address…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Ajith Anil Meera , Marija Popovic , Alexander Millane , Roland Siegwart

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on satellite systems for stable positioning. However, due to limited satellite coverage or communication disruptions, UAVs may lose signals from satellite-based positioning systems. In such situations,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-14 Ming Dai , Enhui Zheng , Zhenhua Feng , Jiedong Zhuang , Wankou Yang

Humans rely on the synergistic control of head (cephalomotor) and eye (oculomotor) to efficiently search for visual information in 360{\deg}. However, prior approaches to visual search are limited to a static image, neglecting the physical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Heyang Yu , Yinan Han , Xiangyu Zhang , Baiqiao Yin , Bowen Chang , Xiangyu Han , Xinhao Liu , Jing Zhang , Marco Pavone , Chen Feng , Saining Xie , Yiming Li