# Aerial and drone VLA

Area: [Vision-language-action models](https://mlsanity.com/vla/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/vla/aerial-and-drone-vla/

## Key facts

- Aerial and drone VLA: 17 papers on arXiv since 2025 (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- 7 of its 17 mapped papers (41%) cite “CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVs” (2025, arXiv 2503.01378).
- 5 of its 17 mapped papers (29%) cite “VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environments” (2025, arXiv 2512.15258).
- 3 new papers 17 Sep–7 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01378/) (2025), cited by 7 papers here
- [VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15258/) (2025), cited by 5 papers here
- [GRaD-Nav++: Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14009/) (2025), cited by 3 papers here
- [SINGER: An Onboard Generalist Vision-Language Navigation Policy for Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18610/) (2025), cited by 2 papers here
- [AIR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Systems for Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21602/) (2026), cited by 2 papers here
- [UAV-Track VLA: Embodied Aerial Tracking via Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02241/) (2026), cited by 2 papers here
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13654/) (2026), cited by 2 papers here
- [π, But Make It Fly: Physics-Guided Transfer of VLA Models to Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25038/) (2026), cited by 1 papers here

## New (17 Sep–7 Oct)

- [WareFly-VLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework for UAV Navigation and Human Tracking in Smart Warehouses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08526/) (2026-10-06)
- [From Local Whole-Body VLA Behaviors to Scene-Scale Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39670/) (2026-09-30)
- [AeroManip-VLA: Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning for Aerial Manipulation with RL-Generated Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36915/) (2026-09-29)