VLM-RRT: Vision Language Model Guided RRT Search for Autonomous UAV Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ye, Jianlin, Papaioannou, Savvas, Kolios, Panayiotis
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ye, Jianlin
Papaioannou, Savvas
Kolios, Panayiotis
author_facet Ye, Jianlin
Papaioannou, Savvas
Kolios, Panayiotis
contents Path planning is a fundamental capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), enabling them to efficiently navigate toward a target region or explore complex environments while avoiding obstacles. Traditional pathplanning methods, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have proven effective but often encounter significant challenges. These include high search space complexity, suboptimal path quality, and slow convergence, issues that are particularly problematic in high-stakes applications like disaster response, where rapid and efficient planning is critical. To address these limitations and enhance path-planning efficiency, we propose Vision Language Model RRT (VLM-RRT), a hybrid approach that integrates the pattern recognition capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) with the path-planning strengths of RRT. By leveraging VLMs to provide initial directional guidance based on environmental snapshots, our method biases sampling toward regions more likely to contain feasible paths, significantly improving sampling efficiency and path quality. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments with various state-of-the-art VLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLM-RRT: Vision Language Model Guided RRT Search for Autonomous UAV Navigation
Ye, Jianlin
Papaioannou, Savvas
Kolios, Panayiotis
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Path planning is a fundamental capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), enabling them to efficiently navigate toward a target region or explore complex environments while avoiding obstacles. Traditional pathplanning methods, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have proven effective but often encounter significant challenges. These include high search space complexity, suboptimal path quality, and slow convergence, issues that are particularly problematic in high-stakes applications like disaster response, where rapid and efficient planning is critical. To address these limitations and enhance path-planning efficiency, we propose Vision Language Model RRT (VLM-RRT), a hybrid approach that integrates the pattern recognition capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) with the path-planning strengths of RRT. By leveraging VLMs to provide initial directional guidance based on environmental snapshots, our method biases sampling toward regions more likely to contain feasible paths, significantly improving sampling efficiency and path quality. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments with various state-of-the-art VLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach.
title VLM-RRT: Vision Language Model Guided RRT Search for Autonomous UAV Navigation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23267