# IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04957/) (2019)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06735/) (2023)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)
- [General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05446/) (2019)
- [Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03454/) (2021)
- [Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07087/) (2024)
- [Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05655/) (2020)
- [Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09082/) (2024)
- [UAV-Flow Colosseo: A Real-World Benchmark for Flying-on-a-Word UAV Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15725/) (2025)
- [RoomTour3D: Geometry-Aware Video-Instruction Tuning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08591/) (2024)
- [SkyVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation and NMPC Control for UAVs in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06564/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Self in Space: Benchmarking Self-Awareness and Spatial Cognition in UAV Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12477/) (2026)
- [UAV-Track VLA: Embodied Aerial Tracking via Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02241/) (2026)
- [ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01371/) (2026)
- [ActiveFly-Bench: Aligning Embodied Question Answering with Vision-Language-Action for Aerial Embodied Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10180/) (2026)
- [Position: Embodied AI Requires a Privacy-Utility Trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05017/) (2026)
- [CosFly-VLA: A Spatially Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15004/) (2026)
- [AeroDPO: Unleashing Lightweight UAV Navigation with High-Fidelity Perception and Automated Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07557/) (2026)
- [NavGen: Visual Generative Models as a Scalable Data Engine for Embodied 3D Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30770/) (2026)
- [AION: Aerial Indoor Object-Goal Navigation Using Dual-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15614/) (2026)
- [Map the Possibilities: Spatial Belief Fields for Language-Goal Aerial Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05841/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables agents to navigate in complex environments by following natural language instructions grounded in visual observations. Although most existing work has focused on ground-based robots or outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), indoor UAV-based VLN remains underexplored, despite its relevance to real-world applications such as inspection, delivery, and search-and-rescue in confined spaces. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndoorUAV, a novel benchmark and method specifically tailored for VLN with indoor UAVs. We begin by curating over 1,000 diverse and structurally rich 3D indoor scenes from the Habitat simulator. Within these environments, we simulate realistic UAV flight dynamics to collect diverse 3D navigation trajectories manually, further enriched through data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we design an automated annotation pipeline to generate natural language instructions of varying granularity for each trajectory. This process yields over 16,000 high-quality trajectories, comprising the IndoorUAV-VLN subset, which focuses on long-horizon VLN. To support short-horizon planning, we segment long trajectories into sub-trajectories by selecting semantically salient keyframes and regenerating concise instructions, forming the IndoorUAV-VLA subset. Finally, we introduce IndoorUAV-Agent, a novel navigation model designed for our benchmark, leveraging task decomposition and multimodal reasoning. We hope IndoorUAV serves as a valuable resource to advance research on vision-language embodied AI in the indoor aerial navigation domain.