Fly0: Persistent Metric Anchoring for Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Current Visual-Language Navigation (VLN) methodologies face a trade-off between semantic understanding and control precision. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer superior reasoning, deploying them as low-level controllers leads to high latency, trajectory oscillations, and poor generalization due to weak geometric grounding. To address these limitations, we propose Fly0, a framework that decouples semantic reasoning from geometric planning. The proposed method operates through a three-stage pipeline: (1) an MLLM-driven module for grounding natural language instructions into 2D pixel coordinates; (2) a geometric projection module that utilizes depth data to localize targets in 3D space; and (3) a geometric planner that generates collision-free trajectories. This mechanism enables robust navigation even when visual contact is lost. By eliminating the need for continuous inference, Fly0 reduces computational overhead and improves system stability. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that Fly0 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the Success Rate by over 20% and reducing Navigation Error (NE) by approximately 50% in unstructured environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuzhenxing1/Fly0.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.
Builds on
28 of 38 references.
References · 28
- 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,172
- 2016Modeling Context in Referring Expressionscited by 1,054
- 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
- 2022LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Actioncited by 435
- 2022Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigationcited by 362
- 2018Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 337
- 2018Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 304
- 2020A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigationcited by 300
- 2023NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Modelscited by 274
- 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 228
- 2019Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Taskscited by 177
- 2023AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVscited by 117
16 more
- 2024Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodologycited by 92
- 2022Cross-modal Map Learning for Vision and Language Navigationcited by 91
- 2020EGO-Planner: An ESDF-free Gradient-based Local Planner for Quadrotorscited by 47
- 2025Openfly: A comprehensive platform for aerial vision-language navigationcited by 43
- 2025CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Spacecited by 31
- 2025CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memorycited by 30
- 2025UAV-Flow Colosseo: A Real-World Benchmark for Flying-on-a-Word UAV Imitation Learningcited by 30
- 2025UAV-VLA: Vision-Language-Action System for Large Scale Aerial Mission Generationcited by 27
- 2024Exploring Spatial Representation to Enhance LLM Reasoning in Aerial Vision-Language Navigationcited by 18
- 2024NavAgent: Multi-scale Urban Street View Fusion For UAV Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 18
- 2025See, Point, Fly: A Learning-Free VLM Framework for Universal Unmanned Aerial Navigationcited by 18
- 2025Grounded Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs with Open-Vocabulary Goal Understandingcited by 17
- 2025GeoNav: Empowering MLLMs with dual-scale geospatial reasoning for language-goal aerial navigationcited by 16
- 2025OpenVLN: Open-world Aerial Vision-Language Navigationcited by 12
- 2025Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoningcited by 7
- 2026AirNav: A Large-Scale UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation Dataset with Natural and Diverse Instructionscited by 5
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation via Shared Bird's-Eye Mapscited by 1
- 2026From Semantic Grounding to Decision Optimization: A Unified Framework for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigationcited by 0
- 2026Evaluating Multimodal LLMs as Generalist Vision-Language-Action Agents for Drone Control: Commanding, Approaching, Tracking and Searchingcited by 0
- 2026Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation via Shared Bird's-Eye Maps3 Sep 2026
- 2026Evaluating Multimodal LLMs as Generalist Vision-Language-Action Agents for Drone Control: Commanding, Approaching, Tracking and Searching1 Sep 2026
- 2026From Semantic Grounding to Decision Optimization: A Unified Framework for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation10 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026AirHunt: Bridging VLM Semantics and Continuous Planning for Efficient Aerial Object Navigation
- 2026Vision-Language Navigation for Aerial Robots: Towards the Era of Large Language Models
- 2026OnFly: Onboard Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation toward Safety and Efficiency
- 2025SoraNav: Adaptive UAV Task-Centric Navigation via Zeroshot VLM Reasoning
- 2026AnchorVLN: Geometry-Anchored Vision-Language Grounding Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Navigation
- 2026LookasideVLN: Direction-Aware Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation
- 2026AirAnchor: Bridging Local and Global Spatial Information for Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation
- 2026ViSA-Enhanced Aerial VLN: A Visual-Spatial Reasoning Enhanced Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation