# Flow-Aided Flight Through Dynamic Clutters From Point To Motion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16372/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [NavRL++: A System-Level Framework for Improving Sim-to-Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning-Based Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15559/) (2026)
- [Anticipatory Risk-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Safe Flight Through Dynamic Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23565/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Challenges in traversing dynamic clutters lie mainly in the efficient perception of the environmental dynamics and the generation of evasive behaviors considering obstacle movement. Previous solutions have made progress in explicitly modeling the dynamic obstacle motion for avoidance, but this key dependency of decision-making is time-consuming and unreliable in highly dynamic scenarios with occlusions. On the contrary, without introducing object detection, tracking, and prediction, we empower the reinforcement learning (RL) with single LiDAR sensing to realize an autonomous flight system directly from point to motion. For exteroception, a depth sensing distance map achieving fixed-shape, low-resolution, and detail-safe is encoded from raw point clouds, and an environment change sensing point flow is adopted as motion features extracted from multi-frame observations. These two are integrated into a lightweight and easy-to-learn representation of complex dynamic environments. For action generation, the behavior of avoiding dynamic threats in advance is implicitly driven by the proposed change-aware sensing representation, where the policy optimization is indicated by the relative motion modulated distance field. With the deployment-friendly sensing simulation and dynamics model-free acceleration control, the proposed system shows a superior success rate and adaptability to alternatives, and the policy derived from the simulator can drive a real-world quadrotor with safe maneuvers.
