LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Diller, Jonathan A., Cladera, Fernando, Taylor, Camillo J., Kumar, Vijay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Diller, Jonathan A.
Cladera, Fernando
Taylor, Camillo J.
Kumar, Vijay
author_facet Diller, Jonathan A.
Cladera, Fernando
Taylor, Camillo J.
Kumar, Vijay
contents Traditional autonomous UAV search missions rely on geometric coverage patterns that ignore the semantic context of the target, leading to significant time waste in large-scale environments. In this paper we present LMPath, a pipeline for generating language-mediated exploration priors for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) search missions that leverages semantics. Given a basic geofence and an object of interest prompt, LMPath uses generative language models to determine what regions of the environment should contain that object and a foundation vision model ran over satellite imagery to segment sub-regions that form the exploration prior. This prior can then be used to generate UAV paths with various objectives, such as minimizing the expected time to locate the object of interest, maximizing the probability that the object is found given a limited travel distance, or narrowing down the search space to sub-regions that are most likely to contain the object. To demonstrate it's capabilities, we used LMPath to generate various UAV paths and ran them using a real UAV over large-scale environments. We also ran simulations to demonstrate how paths generated using LMPath outperform traditional path planning approaches for search missions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration
Diller, Jonathan A.
Cladera, Fernando
Taylor, Camillo J.
Kumar, Vijay
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Traditional autonomous UAV search missions rely on geometric coverage patterns that ignore the semantic context of the target, leading to significant time waste in large-scale environments. In this paper we present LMPath, a pipeline for generating language-mediated exploration priors for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) search missions that leverages semantics. Given a basic geofence and an object of interest prompt, LMPath uses generative language models to determine what regions of the environment should contain that object and a foundation vision model ran over satellite imagery to segment sub-regions that form the exploration prior. This prior can then be used to generate UAV paths with various objectives, such as minimizing the expected time to locate the object of interest, maximizing the probability that the object is found given a limited travel distance, or narrowing down the search space to sub-regions that are most likely to contain the object. To demonstrate it's capabilities, we used LMPath to generate various UAV paths and ran them using a real UAV over large-scale environments. We also ran simulations to demonstrate how paths generated using LMPath outperform traditional path planning approaches for search missions.
title LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13782