High-Speed Vision-Based Flight in Clutter with Safety-Shielded Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Jiarui, Lei, Chengyong, Dai, Chengjiang, Wang, Lijie, Han, Zhichao, Gao, Fei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhang, Jiarui
Lei, Chengyong
Dai, Chengjiang
Wang, Lijie
Han, Zhichao
Gao, Fei
author_facet Zhang, Jiarui
Lei, Chengyong
Dai, Chengjiang
Wang, Lijie
Han, Zhichao
Gao, Fei
contents Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex missions that demand reliable autonomous navigation and robust obstacle avoidance. However, traditional modular pipelines often incur cumulative latency, whereas purely reinforcement learning (RL) approaches typically provide limited formal safety guarantees. To bridge this gap, we propose an end-to-end RL framework augmented with model-based safety mechanisms. We incorporate physical priors in both training and deployment. During training, we design a physics-informed reward structure that provides global navigational guidance. During deployment, we integrate a real-time safety filter that projects the policy outputs onto a provably safe set to enforce strict collision-avoidance constraints. This hybrid architecture reconciles high-speed flight with robust safety assurances. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms both traditional planners and recent end-to-end obstacle avoidance approaches based on differentiable physics. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization, enabling reliable high-speed navigation in dense clutter and challenging outdoor forest environments at velocities up to 7.5m/s.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08653
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle High-Speed Vision-Based Flight in Clutter with Safety-Shielded Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Jiarui
Lei, Chengyong
Dai, Chengjiang
Wang, Lijie
Han, Zhichao
Gao, Fei
Robotics
Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex missions that demand reliable autonomous navigation and robust obstacle avoidance. However, traditional modular pipelines often incur cumulative latency, whereas purely reinforcement learning (RL) approaches typically provide limited formal safety guarantees. To bridge this gap, we propose an end-to-end RL framework augmented with model-based safety mechanisms. We incorporate physical priors in both training and deployment. During training, we design a physics-informed reward structure that provides global navigational guidance. During deployment, we integrate a real-time safety filter that projects the policy outputs onto a provably safe set to enforce strict collision-avoidance constraints. This hybrid architecture reconciles high-speed flight with robust safety assurances. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms both traditional planners and recent end-to-end obstacle avoidance approaches based on differentiable physics. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization, enabling reliable high-speed navigation in dense clutter and challenging outdoor forest environments at velocities up to 7.5m/s.
title High-Speed Vision-Based Flight in Clutter with Safety-Shielded Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08653