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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Xu, Liu, Yu, Qiu, Hanshuo, Qirong, Yang, Lian, Zhouhui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Xu
Liu, Yu
Qiu, Hanshuo
Qirong, Yang
Lian, Zhouhui
author_facet Liu, Xu
Liu, Yu
Qiu, Hanshuo
Qirong, Yang
Lian, Zhouhui
contents 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 \textbf{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 \textbf{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 \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLA} subset. Finally, we introduce \textbf{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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19024
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments
Liu, Xu
Liu, Yu
Qiu, Hanshuo
Qirong, Yang
Lian, Zhouhui
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
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 \textbf{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 \textbf{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 \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLA} subset. Finally, we introduce \textbf{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.
title IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19024