HoverAI: An Embodied Aerial Agent for Natural Human-Drone Interaction
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Drones operating in human-occupied spaces suffer from insufficient communication mechanisms that create uncertainty about their intentions. We present HoverAI, an embodied aerial agent that integrates drone mobility, infrastructure-independent visual projection, and real-time conversational AI into a unified platform. Equipped with a MEMS laser projector, onboard semi-rigid screen, and RGB camera, HoverAI perceives users through vision and voice, responding via lip-synced avatars that adapt appearance to user demographics. The system employs a multimodal pipeline combining VAD, ASR (Whisper), LLM-based intent classification, RAG for dialogue, face analysis for personalization, and voice synthesis (XTTS v2). Evaluation demonstrates high accuracy in command recognition (F1: 0.90), demographic estimation (gender F1: 0.89, age MAE: 5.14 years), and speech transcription (WER: 0.181). By uniting aerial robotics with adaptive conversational AI and self-contained visual output, HoverAI introduces a new class of spatially-aware, socially responsive embodied agents for applications in guidance, assistance, and human-centered interaction.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 4 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.
Builds on
4 of 17 references.
References · 4
- 2024XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Modelcited by 179
- 2025Embodied AI Agents: Modeling the Worldcited by 61
- 2025CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVscited by 22
- 2022Display of 3D Illuminations using Flying Light Speckscited by 1
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- 2026ActiveFly-Bench: Aligning Embodied Question Answering with Vision-Language-Action for Aerial Embodied Perception
- 2026Evaluating Multimodal LLMs as Generalist Vision-Language-Action Agents for Drone Control: Commanding, Approaching, Tracking and Searching
- 2025Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories
- 2026UAVs Meet Embodied Intelligence: Bridging Human Intents and Flying Dynamics Via Harnessing Physical-Digital AI Agents
- 2024AeroVerse: UAV-Agent Benchmark Suite for Simulating, Pre-training, Finetuning, and Evaluating Aerospace Embodied World Models
- 2025AirCopBench: A Benchmark for Multi-drone Collaborative Embodied Perception and Reasoning
- 2026Learning to Understand Body Language from Flight through Robust 3D Avatar Placing
- 2025Taking Flight with Dialogue: Enabling Natural Language Control for PX4-based Drone Agent