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Main Authors: Yan, Zichen, Hou, Yuchen, Wang, Shenao, Gao, Yichao, Huang, Rui, Zhao, Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15614
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author Yan, Zichen
Hou, Yuchen
Wang, Shenao
Gao, Yichao
Huang, Rui
Zhao, Lin
author_facet Yan, Zichen
Hou, Yuchen
Wang, Shenao
Gao, Yichao
Huang, Rui
Zhao, Lin
contents Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to autonomously explore an unknown environment and navigate toward target objects specified by a semantic label. While prior work has primarily studied zero-shot ObjectNav under 2D locomotion, extending it to aerial platforms with 3D locomotion capability remains underexplored. Aerial robots offer superior maneuverability and search efficiency, but they also introduce new challenges in spatial perception, dynamic control, and safety assurance. In this paper, we propose AION for vision-based aerial ObjectNav without relying on external localization or global maps. AION is an end-to-end dual-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework that decouples exploration and goal-reaching behaviors into two specialized policies. We evaluate AION on the AI2-THOR benchmark and further assess its real-time performance in IsaacSim using high-fidelity drone models. Experimental results show that AION achieves superior performance across comprehensive evaluation metrics in exploration, navigation efficiency, and safety. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/TgsUm6bb7zg.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15614
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AION: Aerial Indoor Object-Goal Navigation Using Dual-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Yan, Zichen
Hou, Yuchen
Wang, Shenao
Gao, Yichao
Huang, Rui
Zhao, Lin
Robotics
Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to autonomously explore an unknown environment and navigate toward target objects specified by a semantic label. While prior work has primarily studied zero-shot ObjectNav under 2D locomotion, extending it to aerial platforms with 3D locomotion capability remains underexplored. Aerial robots offer superior maneuverability and search efficiency, but they also introduce new challenges in spatial perception, dynamic control, and safety assurance. In this paper, we propose AION for vision-based aerial ObjectNav without relying on external localization or global maps. AION is an end-to-end dual-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework that decouples exploration and goal-reaching behaviors into two specialized policies. We evaluate AION on the AI2-THOR benchmark and further assess its real-time performance in IsaacSim using high-fidelity drone models. Experimental results show that AION achieves superior performance across comprehensive evaluation metrics in exploration, navigation efficiency, and safety. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/TgsUm6bb7zg.
title AION: Aerial Indoor Object-Goal Navigation Using Dual-Policy Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15614