Article Contents
REVIEW   Open Access     Cite

AeroVerse-Review: Comprehensive survey on aerial embodied vision-and-language navigation

    Show all affliationsShow less
More Information
  • Corresponding author: yaofanglong17@mails.ucas.ac.cn 
  • DownLoad: Full size image
    1. Comprehensive review of unmanned aerial vehicle based vision-and-language navigation (UAV-VLN).

      Provide a summary of methodological evolution, from single-UAV navigation to multi-agent collaboration.

      Outline promising future directions, such as embodied world models and space-air-ground unmanned systems.

  • With the rapid advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, embedding intelligence into aerial platforms has become an increasingly important research direction. UAV-based vision-and-language navigation (UAV-VLN), as a representative paradigm of aerospace embodied intelligence, requires UAVs to understand natural language instructions and integrate multimodal perception to autonomously plan and execute navigation tasks in three-dimensional environments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of UAV-VLN research, covering simulation platforms, task definitions, core methodologies, datasets and evaluation metrics, application scenarios, as well as key challenges and future directions. We first present the design principles and capabilities of mainstream simulators, followed by a structured summary of methodological progress, including rule-based approaches, deep learning-driven models, and multi-agent collaborative strategies. We then discuss critical technical challenges in UAV-VLN, such as dynamic feasibility and control in 3D space, perception and generalization in complex environments, linguistic ambiguity and cross-modal semantic grounding, long-term spatiotemporal reasoning, and deployment under resource constraints. Based on these challenges, we outline promising future directions, including standardized benchmark development, Sim-to-Real and cross-domain transfer, pretrained large model integration, embodied world model, collaborative and interactive UAV-VLN, and embodied navigation of space-air-ground unmanned systems. This survey aims to provide a structured reference for future research and to guide the practical deployment of UAV-VLN systems.
  • 加载中
  • [1] Yao F., Yue Y., Liu Y., et al. (2024). Aeroverse: Uav-agent benchmark suite for simulating, pre-training, finetuning, and evaluating aerospace embodied world models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2408.15511

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [2] Liu Y., Yao F., Yue Y., et al (2024). Navagent: Multi-scale urban street view fusion for uav embodied vision-and-language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2411.08579

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [3] Li J. and Yang S.X. (2025). Digital twins to embodied artificial intelligence: Review and perspective. Intell. Robot. 5:202−227. DOI:10.20517/ir.2025.11

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [4] Sarkar A., Narasimhan S.S., Singh A.P., et al. (2024). Gomaa-geo: Goal modality agnostic active geo-localization. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2406.01917

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [5] Liu J., Cui J., Ye M., et al. (2024). Shooting condition insensitive unmanned aerial vehicle object detection. Expert Syst. Appl. 246:123221. DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2023.123221

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [6] Qiu H., Li J., Gan J., et al. (2024). Dronegpt: Zero-shot video question answering for drones. CVDL '24. 64:1–6. DOI: 10.1145/3653804.3654608

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [7] Chen G. (2023). Typefly: Flying drones with large language model. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2312.14950

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [8] Kondo K. (2023). Real: Resilience and adaptation using large language models on autonomous aerial robots. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2311.01403

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [9] Long X., Zhao Q., Zhang K., et al. (2025). A survey: Learning embodied intelligence from physical simulators and world models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2507.00917

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [10] DJI. (2022). Dji drone solutions for inspection and infrastructure construction in the oil and gas industry. https://enterprise.dji.com/cn/oil-and-gas

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [11] DJI. (2022). Dji drone solutions for optimizing operations in the public safety industry. https://enterprise.dji.com/cn/public-safety

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [12] DJI. (2022). Dji drone solutions for surveying, urban planning, aec, and natural resource management. https://enterprise.dji.com/cn/surveying

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [13] Anderson P., Wu Q., Teney D., et al. (2018). Vision-and-language navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn.2018:3674–3683. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2018.00387

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [14] Qi Y., Wu Q., Anderson P., et al. (2020). Reverie: Remote embodied visual referring expression in real indoor environments. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn.2020:9975–9984. DOI:10.1109/CVPR42600.2020.01000

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [15] Jain V., Magalhaes G., Ku A., et al. (2019). Stay on the path: Instruction fidelity in vision-and-language navigation. Assoc. Comput. Ling.1: 1867–1876. DOI:10.18653/v1/P19-1181

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [16] Ku A., Anderson P., Patel R., et al. (2020). Room-across-room: Multilingual vision-and-language navigation with dense spatiotemporal grounding. Empir. Methods Nat. Lang. Process. 2020:4392–4412. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.355

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [17] Li C., Xia F., Martín-Martín R., et al. (2021). Igibson 2.0: Object-centric simulation for robot learning of everyday household tasks. Conf. Robot Learn.155:455–465. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2108.03272

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [18] Shen B., Xia F., Li C., et al. (2021). Igibson 1.0: A simulation environment for interactive tasks in large realistic scenes. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2021:7520–7527. DOI:10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636509

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [19] Xia F., Shen W.B., Li C., et al. (2020). Interactive gibson benchmark: A benchmark for interactive navigation in cluttered environments. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 5:713−720. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2020.2965079

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [20] Huang Y., Chen J. and Huang D. (2022). Ufpmp-det: Toward accurate and efficient object detection on drone imagery. AAAI Conf. Artif. Intell. 36:1026−1033. DOI:10.1609/aaai.v36i1.19986

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [21] Zhu X., Lyu S., Wang X., et al. (2021). Tph-yolov5: Improved yolov5 based on transformer prediction head for object detection on drone-captured scenarios. IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2021:2778–2788. DOI:10.1109/ICCVW54120.2021.00312

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [22] Lin F. (2025). Uavs meet llms: Overviews and perspectives toward agentic low-altitude mobility. Inf. Fusion. 122:103158. DOI:10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103158

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [23] Hao W., Li C., Lee P., et al. (2020). Towards learning a generic agent for vision-and-language navigation via pre-training. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2020:13134–13143. DOI:10.1109/CVPR42600.2020.01315

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [24] Ke L., Li X., Huang B., et al. (2019). Tactical rewind: Self-correction via backtracking in vision-and-language navigation. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2019:6734–6743. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2019.00689

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [25] Qi Y., Pan Z., Zhang S., et al. (2020). Object-and-action aware model for visual language navigation. Eur. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2020:303–317. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-58598-3_19

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [26] Chattopadhyay P., Hoffman J., Parikh D., et al. (2021). Robustnav: Towards benchmarking robustness in embodied navigation. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2021:15671–15680. DOI:10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.01539

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [27] Chen S., Guhur P.L., Tapaswi M., et al. (2022). Think global, act local: Dual-scale graph transformer for vision-and-language navigation. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2022:16516–16526. DOI:10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.01607

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [28] Shah S., Dey D., Lovett C., et al. (2018). Airsim: High-fidelity visual and physical simulation for autonomous vehicles. Field Serv. Robot. 2018:621–635. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-67361-5_40

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [29] Lee J., Miyanishi T., Kurita S., et al. (2024). Citynav: Language-goal aerial navigation dataset with geographic information. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2024:1–12. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2406.14240

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [30] Liu S., Zhang H., Qi Y., et al. (2023). Aerialvln: Vision-and-language navigation for uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2308.06735

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [31] Gao Y., Li C., You Z., et al. (2025). Openfly: A versatile toolchain and large-scale benchmark for aerial vision-language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2502.18041

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [32] Wu Y. (2025). Learning occlusion-robust vision transformers for real-time uav tracking. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2504.09228

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [33] Wang Z., Li J. and Mahmoudian N. (2024). Synergistic reinforcement and imitation learning for vision-driven autonomous flight of uav along river. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2024:9976–9982. DOI:10.1109/IROS47612.2024.10611488

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [34] Wang X., Huang Q., Celikyilmaz A., et al. (2019). Reinforced cross-modal matching and self-supervised imitation learning for vision-language navigation. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2019:6629–6638. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2019.00679

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [35] Sautenkov O. (2025). Uav-codeagents: Scalable uav mission planning via multi-agent react and vision-language reasoning. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2505.07236

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [36] Zhou G. (2023). Navgpt: Explicit reasoning in vision-and-language navigation with large language models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2305.16986

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [37] Kong L. (2025). Eventfly: Event camera perception from ground to the sky. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2503.19916

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [38] Wang H., Wang W., Liang W., et al. (2021). Structured scene memory for vision-language navigation. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2021:8455–8464. DOI:10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.00846

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [39] Anderson P., Shrivastava A., Parikh D., et al. (2019). Chasing ghosts: Instruction following as bayesian state tracking. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 2019:371–381. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1907.02022

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [40] Zhou Z., Zhang Z., Peng X., et al. (2023). Decentralized cooperative navigation method for multi-uavs based on memory fusion mode. Acta Aeronaut. Astronaut. Sin. 44:28440. DOI:10.7527/S10006893.2023.28440

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [41] Yuan S. (2025). Airswarm: Enabling cost-effective multi-uav research with cots drones. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2503.06890

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [42] Chen J. (2025). Aeroduo: Aerial duo for uav-based vision and language navigation. ACM Int. Conf. Multimedia. 2025:1–10. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2508.15232

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [43] Zhang Y., Hu Y., Song Y., et al. (2025). Learning vision-based agile flight via differentiable physics. Nat. Mach. Intell. 7:954–966. DOI:10.1038/s42256-025-01048-0

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [44] Liao Y., Su J., Ma D., et al. (2025). Uav-satellite cross-view image matching based on adaptive threshold-guided ring partitioning framework. Remote Sens. 17:2448. DOI:10.3390/rs17142448

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [45] Gong N., Li L., Sha J., et al. (2024). A satellite-drone image cross-view geolocalization method based on multi-scale information and dual-channel attention mechanism. Remote Sens. 16:941. DOI:10.3390/rs16060941

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [46] Sautenkov O. (2025). Uav-vlpa: A vision-language-path-action system for optimal route generation on a large scales. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2503.02454

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [47] Anderson P., Wu Q., Teney D., et al. (2018). Vision-and-language navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2018:3674–3683. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2018.00387

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [48] Jain V., Magalhaes G., Ku A., et al. (2019). Stay on the path: Instruction fidelity in vision-and-language navigation. Assoc. Comput. Ling. 2019:1867–1876. DOI:10.18653/v1/P19-1181

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [49] Chen H., Suhr A., Misra D., et al. (2019). Touchdown: Natural language navigation and spatial reasoning in visual street environments. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2019:12538–12547. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2019.01281

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [50] Hong Y., Wu Q., Qi Y., et al. (2020). Language and visual entity relationship graph for agent reasoning in vision-and-language navigation. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 644:7685–7696. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2010.09304

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [51] Tan M. and Le Q. (2019). Efficientnet: Rethinking model scaling for convolutional neural networks. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. 2019:6105–6114. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1905.11946

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [52] Dosovitskiy A., Beyer L., Kolesnikov A., et al. (2020). An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2010.11929

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [53] Mnih V., Kavukcuoglu K., Silver D., et al. (2015). Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. Nature. 518:529−533. DOI:10.1038/nature14236

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [54] Schulman J. (2017). Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1707.06347

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [55] Haarnoja T., Zhou A., Abbeel P., et al. (2018). Soft actor-critic: Off-policy maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning with a stochastic actor. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. 2018:1861–1870. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1801.01290

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [56] Ross S., Gordon G. and Bagnell D. (2011). A reduction of imitation learning and structured prediction to no-regret online learning. Artif. Intell. Stat. 2011:627–635. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1011.0686

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [57] Chen T., Kornblith S., Norouzi M., et al. (2020). A simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. 2020:1597–1607. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2002.05709

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [58] He K., Fan H., Wu Y., et al. (2020). Momentum contrast for unsupervised visual representation learning. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1911.05722

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [59] Kipf T.N. and Welling M. (2017). Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks. arXiv preprint. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1609.02907.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [60] Yang Y., Li Y., Song W., et al. (2018). Graph r-cnn for scene graph generation. Eur. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2018:690–706. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-01246-5_41

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [61] Hu R., Rohrbach A., Darrell T., et al. (2020). Language-conditioned graph networks for relational reasoning. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2020:10294–10303. DOI:10.1109/ICCV.2019.01039

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [62] Bonetto E. (2023). Grade: Generating realistic and dynamic environments for robotics research with isaac sim. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2303.04466

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [63] Handa A. (2021). Isaac gym: High performance gpu-based physics simulation for robot learning. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2108.10470

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [64] Richards A. and How J. (2002). Robust model predictive control for autonomous unmanned rotorcraft. AIAA Guid. Navig. Control Conf. 3:1936−1941.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [65] Forster C., Pizzoli M. and Scaramuzza D. (2014). Svo: Fast semi-direct monocular visual odometry. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2014:15−22. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2014.6906584

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [66] LaValle S. M. (1998). Rapidly-exploring random trees: A new tool for path planning. Tech. Rep. Comput. Sci. Dep. Iowa State Univ.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [67] Karaman S. and Frazzoli E. (2011). Sampling-based algorithms for optimal motion planning. Robot. Sci. Syst. arXiv preprint. DOI: 10.1177/0278364911406761

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [68] Mellinger D. and Kumar V. (2011). Minimum snap trajectory generation and control for quadrotors. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2011:2520−2525. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980409

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [69] Kamel M., Burri M. and Siegwart R. (2017). Linear vs nonlinear mpc for trajectory tracking applied to rotary wing micro aerial vehicles. IFAC World Congr. 50:3463−3469. DOI:10.1016/j.ifacol.2017.08.926

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [70] Mur-Artal R. and Tardós J.D. (2017). Orb-slam2: An open-source slam system for monocular, stereo, and rgb-d cameras. IEEE Trans. Robot. 33:1255−1262. DOI:10.1109/TRO.2017.2705103

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [71] Hart P.E., Nilsson N.J. and Raphael B. (1968). A formal basis for the heuristic determination of minimum cost paths. IEEE Trans. Syst. Sci. Cybern. 4:100−107. DOI:10.1109/TSSC.1968.300136

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [72] Kamel M., Stastny T., Alexis K., et al. (2017). Linear vs non-linear mpc for trajectory tracking applied to rotary wing micro aerial vehicles. IFAC World Congr. 50: 3463–3469. DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2017.08.927

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [73] Mayne D.Q. (2014). Model predictive control: Recent developments and future promise. Automatica. 50:2967−2986. DOI:10.1016/j.automatica.2014.10.128

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [74] Vaswani A., Shazeer N., Parmar N., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 30:5998–6008. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [75] He K., Zhang X., Ren S., et al. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2016: 770–778. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2016.90

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [76] Peng X.B., Andrychowicz M., Zaremba W., et al. (2018). Sim-to-real transfer of robotic control with dynamics randomization. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2018:3803–3810. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2018.8460528

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [77] Tassa Y., Doron Y., Muldal A., et al. (2018). Deepmind control suite. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1801.00690

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [78] Wu S.T. and Hong J.L. (2010). Bayesian relational memory for semantic visual navigation. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2010: 2769–2779. DOI:10.1109/ICCV.2019.00286

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [79] Loquercio A., Maqueda A.I., Del-Blanco C.R., et al. (2018). Dronet: Learning to fly by driving. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 3:1088−1095. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2018.2795645

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [80] Tai L., Paolo G. and Liu M. (2017). Virtual-to-real deep reinforcement learning: Continuous control of mobile robots for mapless navigation. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2017:31–36. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2017.8202134

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [81] Bekmezci I., Sahingoz O.K. and Temel O. (2013). Flying ad-hoc networks (fanets): A survey. Ad Hoc Netw. 11:1254−1270. DOI:10.1016/j.adhoc.2012.12.004

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [82] Brambilla M., Ferrante E., Birattari M., et al. (2013). Swarm robotics: A review from the swarm engineering perspective. Swarm Intell. 7:1−41. DOI:10.1007/s11721-012-0075-2

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [83] Howard A., Zhu M., Chen B., et al. (2020). Multi-uav coordination for large-scale area coverage: A survey and taxonomy. Robot. Auton. Syst. 125:103400. DOI:10.1016/j.robot.2020.103400

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [84] Chen J. (2025). Aeroduo: Aerial duo for uav-based vision and language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2508.15232

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [85] Radford A., Kim J.W., Hallacy C., et al. (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2103.00020

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [86] Dosovitskiy A., Beyer L., Kolesnikov A., et al. (2021). An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale. arXiv preprint. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2010.11929

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [87] Liu Z., Lin Y., Cao Y., et al. (2021). Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2021:10012–10022. DOI:10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.00986

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [88] Radford A., Wu J., Child R., et al. (2019). Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blog. 1:9.https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [89] Yan L. (2023). Vlm-nav: Vision-language models for uav navigation. arXiv preprint.DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2310.02971

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [90] Bouabdallah S. (2007). Design and control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying. PhD Thesis, EPFL. DOI:10.5075/epfl-thesis-3727

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [91] Hoffmann G.M., Huang H., Waslander S.L., et al. (2007). Quadrotor helicopter flight dynamics and control: Theory and experiment. AIAA Guid. Navig. Control Conf 2007:6461. DOI: 10.2514/6.2007-6461

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [92] Mahony R., Kumar V. and Corke P. (2012). Multirotor aerial vehicles: Modeling, estimation, and control of quadrotor. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 19:20−32. DOI:10.1109/MRA.2012.2205474

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [93] Faessler M., Franchi A. and Scaramuzza D. (2018). Differential flatness of quadrotor dynamics subject to rotor drag for accurate tracking control. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 3:620−626. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2017.2776355

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [94] Tobin J., Fong R., Ray A., et al. (2017). Domain randomization for transferring deep neural networks from simulation to the real world. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2019:23–30. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2017.8202133

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [95] Peng X.B., Andrychowicz M., Zaremba W., et al. (2018). Sim-to-real transfer of robotic control with dynamics randomization. arXiv preprint. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1710.06537

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [96] Hinton G., Vinyals O. and Dean J. (2015). Distilling the knowledge in a neural network. arXiv preprint. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1503.02531

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [97] Sandler M., Howard A., Zhu M., et al. (2018). Mobilenetv2: Inverted residuals and linear bottlenecks. Comp. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 4510–4520. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2018.00474

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [98] Redmon J. and Farhadi A. (2018). Yolov3: An incremental improvement. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1804.02767

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [99] NVIDIA Corporation. (2022). Nvidia isaac sim. https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-sim

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [100] Epic Games. (2022). Unreal engine. https://www.unrealengine.com

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [101] Koenig N. and Howard A. (2004). Design and use paradigms for gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2004:2149–2154. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2004.1389727

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [102] Gorelick N., Hancher M., Dixon M., et al. (2017). Google earth engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone. Remote Sens. Environ. 202:18−27. DOI:10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.031

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [103] Ji Y., He B., Tan Z., et al. (2025). Game4loc: A uav geo-localization benchmark from game data. AAAI Conf. Artif. Intell. 39:3913−3921. DOI:10.1609/aaai.v39i4.32409

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [104] Rohmer E., Singh S.P.N. and Freese M. (2013). Coppeliasim (formerly v-rep): A versatile and scalable robot simulation framework. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst 2013:1321-1326. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2013.6696520

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [105] Michel O. (2004). Webots: Professional mobile robot simulation. Int. J. Adv. Robot. Syst. 1:39−42. DOI:10.5772/5618

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [106] Echeverria G., Lemaignan S., Degroote A., et al. (2011). Modular open robots simulation engine: Morse. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2011:46–51. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980355

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [107] Carpin S., Lewis M., Wang J., et al. (2007). Usarsim: A robot simulator for research and education. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2007:1400–1405. DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.2007.363204

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [108] Panerati J. and Schoellig A.P. (2021). Learning to fly—a gym environment with pybullet physics for reinforcement learning of multi-agent quadcopter control. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2021:7512–7519. DOI:10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636161

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [109] Kshitij. (2018). Drone simulation with realistic controls. https://github.com/Kshitij08/Drone-Simulation

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [110] Fan Y., Chen W., Jiang T., et al. (2023). Aerial vision-and-dialog navigation. Assoc. Comput. Ling. 2023:3043–3061. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.190

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [111] Gao C., Zhao B., Zhang W., et al. (2024). Embodiedcity: A benchmark platform for embodied agent in real-world city environment. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2410.09604

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [112] Lin L., Liu Y., Hu Y., et al. (2022). Capturing, reconstructing, and simulating: The urbanscene3d dataset. Eur. Conf. Comput. Vis. 2022:93–109. DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-20056-4_6

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [113] Schmittle M., Lukina A., Vacek L., et al. (2018). Openuav: A uav testbed for the cps and robotics community. Int. Conf. Cyber-Phys. Syst. 2018:130–139. DOI:10.1109/ICCPS.2018.00019

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [114] Zhong F. (2024). Unrealzoo: Enriching photo-realistic virtual worlds for embodied ai. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2412.20977

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [115] Long R. (2025). Embodied crowd counting. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2503.08367

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [116] Wang H. (2024). Grutopia: Dream general robots in a city at scale. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2407.10943

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [117] Wu W. (2024). Metaurban: An embodied ai simulation platform for urban micromobility. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2407.08725

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [118] Xu Z., Deng D., Dong Y., et al. (2022). Dpmpc-planner: A real-time uav trajectory planning framework for complex static environments with dynamic obstacles. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2022:250–256. DOI:10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9812165

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [119] Mourikis A.I. and Roumeliotis S.I. (2007). A multi-state constraint kalman filter for vision-aided inertial navigation. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2007:3565–3572. DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.2007.364024

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [120] Oleynikova H., Burri M., Taylor Z., et al. (2016). Continuous-time trajectory optimization for online uav replanning. Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2016:5332–5339. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2016.7759774

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [121] Mohta K., Sun K., Liu S., et al. (2018). Experiments in fast, autonomous, gps-denied quadrotor flight. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2018:7832–7839. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2018.8461076

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [122] Ren Y., Zhu F., Lu G., et al. (2025). Safety-assured high-speed navigation for mavs. Sci. Robot. 10:eado6187. DOI:10.1126/scirobotics.ado6187

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [123] Xu W., Cai Y., He D., et al. (2022). Fast-lio2: Fast direct lidar-inertial odometry. IEEE Trans. Robot. 38:2053−2073. DOI:10.1109/TRO.2022.3141876

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [124] Cao S., Lu X. and Shen S. (2022). Gvins: Tightly coupled gnss–visual–inertial fusion for smooth and consistent state estimation. IEEE Trans. Robot. 38:2004−2021. DOI:10.1109/TRO.2022.3148900

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [125] Hui Y., Chen X., Xu S., et al. (1998). An unmanned air vehicle (uav) gps location and navigation system. Int. Conf. Microwave Millim. Wave Technol. 1998:472–475. DOI:10.1109/ICMMT.1998.768328

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [126] Williamson W.R., Rios T. and Speyer J.L. (1999). Carrier phase differential gps/ins positioning for formation flight. Am. Control Conf. 5:3665−3670 DOI:10.1109/ACC.1999.786276

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [127] Williamson W.R., Abdel-Hafez M.F., Rhee I., et al. (2007). An instrumentation system applied to formation flight. IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol. 15:75−85. DOI:10.1109/TCST.2006.883336

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [128] Pany T., Akos D., Arribas J., et al. (2024). Gnss software-defined radio: History, current developments, and standardization efforts. Navigation. 71. DOI:10.33012/navi.628

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [129] Mohta K., Watterson M., Mulgaonkar Y., et al. (2018). Fast, autonomous flight in gps-denied and cluttered environments. J. Field Robot. 35:101−120. DOI:10.1002/rob.21774

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [130] Forster C., Zhang Z., Gassner M., et al. (2017). Svo: Semidirect visual odometry for monocular and multicamera systems. IEEE Trans. Robot. 33:249−265. DOI:10.1109/TRO.2016.2623335

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [131] Wang Q., Zheng C. and Wu P. (2022). Geomagnetic/inertial navigation integrated matching navigation method. Heliyon. 8:e11249. DOI:10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11249

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [132] Fang Z., Yang S., Jain S., et al. (2017). Robust autonomous flight in constrained and visually degraded shipboard environments. J. Field Robot. 34:25−52. DOI:10.1002/rob.21673

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [133] Oleynikova H., Taylor Z., Fehr M., et al. (2017). Voxblox: Incremental 3d euclidean signed distance fields for on-board mav planning. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2017:1366–1373. DOI:10.1109/IROS.2017.8202315

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [134] Oleynikova H., Honegger D. and Pollefeys M. (2015). Reactive avoidance using embedded stereo vision for mav flight. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2015:50–56. DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7138992

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [135] Lin J., Zhu H. and Alonso-Mora J. (2020). Robust vision-based obstacle avoidance for micro aerial vehicles in dynamic environments. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2020:2680–2686. DOI:10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196975.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [136] Wang Y., Ji J., Wang Q., et al. (2021). Autonomous flights in dynamic environments with onboard vision. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2021:1966–1973. DOI:10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636005

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [137] Zhou B., Gao F., Wang L., et al. (2019). Robust and efficient quadrotor trajectory generation for fast autonomous flight. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 4:3529−3536. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2019.2926660

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [138] Zhou X., Wang Z., Xu C., et al. (2021). Ego-planner: An esdf-free gradient-based local planner for quadrotors. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 6:478−485. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2020.3047704

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [139] Xu Z., Xiu Y., Lyu X., et al. (2023). Vision-aided uav navigation and dynamic obstacle avoidance using gradient-based b-spline trajectory optimization. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2023:1214–1220. DOI:10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160899

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [140] Liu J.Y., Guo Z.Q. and Liu S.Y. (2012). The simulation of the uav collision avoidance based on the artificial potential field method. Adv. Mater. Res. 591-593:1400–1404. DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.591-593.1400

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [141] Jenie Y.I., van Kampen E.J., de Visser C.C., et al. (2016). Three-dimensional velocity obstacle method for uav’s uncoordinated avoidance maneuver. AIAA Guid. Navig. Control Conf. 2016:1842. DOI:10.2514/6.2016-1842

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [142] Emami Y., Zhou H., Almeida L., et al. (2025). Diffusion models for smarter uavs: Decision-making and modeling. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2501.05819

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [143] Ali A.M., Gupta A. and Hashim H.A. (2024). Deep reinforcement learning for sim-to-real policy transfer of vtol-uavs offshore docking operations. Appl. Soft Comput.165:111843 DOI: 10.1016/j.asoc.2024.111843

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [144] Zhu Y., Chen M., Wang S., et al. (2024). Collaborative reinforcement learning based unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) trajectory design for 3d uav tracking. IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 23:10787−10802. DOI:10.1109/TMC.2024.3382913

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [145] Dash P., Chan E., Lawrence N.P., et al. (2025). Armor: Robust reinforcement learning-based control for uavs under physical attacks. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2506.22423

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [146] Tai J.J., Wong J., Innocente M., et al. (2023). Pyflyt–uav simulation environments for reinforcement learning research. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2304.01305

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [147] He M., Wang P., Chen H., et al. (2025). Optimization of flying ad hoc network topology and collaborative path planning for multiple uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2506.17945

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [148] Xu Z., Han X., Shen H., et al. (2025). Navrl: Learning safe flight in dynamic environments. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2025.3452541

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [149] Xu H., Hu Y., Gao C., et al. (2025). Geonav: Empowering mllms with explicit geospatial reasoning abilities for language-goal aerial navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2504.09587

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [150] Wu G., Zhao Z. and He Y. (2023). Relax: Reinforcement learning enabled 2d-lidar autonomous system for parsimonious uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2309.08095

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [151] Zhang W., Gao C., Yu S., et al. (2025). Citynavagent: Aerial vision-and-language navigation with hierarchical semantic planning and global memory. Assoc. Comput. Ling. 2025:1511–1521. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1511

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [152] Zhan Z., Yu L., Yu S., et al. (2024). Mc-gpt: Empowering vision-and-language navigation with memory map and reasoning chains. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2405.10620

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [153] Long Y., Cai W., Wang H., et al. (2024). Instructnav: Zero-shot system for generic instruction navigation in unexplored environment. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2406.04882

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [154] Shah D., Osiński B., ichter B., et al. (2023). Lm-nav: Robotic navigation with large pre-trained models of language, vision, and action. Conf. Robot Learn. 229:492–504. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2207.04429

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [155] Li D., Chen W. and Lin X. (2024). Tina: Think, interaction, and action framework for zero-shot vision language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2403.08833

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [156] Lin B., Nie Y., Wei Z., et al. (2024). Navcot: Boosting llm-based vision-and-language navigation via learning disentangled reasoning. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 46:9423-9438. DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3457291

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [157] Hong Y., Wu Q., Qi Y., et al. (2021). A recurrent vision-and-language bert for navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2011.13922

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [158] Zhang X., Tian Y., Zhu F., et al. (2025). Logisticsvln: Vision-language navigation for low-altitude terminal delivery based on agentic uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2505.03460

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [159] Cai H., Dong J., Tan J., et al. (2025). Flightgpt: Towards generalizable and interpretable uav vision-and-language navigation with vision-language models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2505.12835

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [160] Gao Y., Wang Z., Jing L., et al. (2024). Exploring spatial representation to enhance llm reasoning in aerial vision-language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2410.08500

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [161] Saxena P., Raghuvanshi N. and Goveas N. (2025). Uav-vln: End-to-end vision language guided navigation for uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2504.21432

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [162] Li T., Huai T., Li Z., et al. (2025). Skyvln: Vision-and-language navigation and nmpc control for uavs in urban environments. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2507.06564

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [163] Chen J., Lin B., Xu R., et al. (2024). Mapgpt: Map-guided prompting with adaptive path planning for vision-and-language navigation. Assoc. Comput. Ling. 2024.acl-long:9796–9810. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.529

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [164] Long Y., Li X., Cai W., et al. (2024). Discuss before moving: Visual language navigation via multi-expert discussions. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 2024:10807-10813. DOI:10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610391

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [165] Gao Y., Wang Z., Jing L., et al. (2024). Aerial vision-and-language navigation via semantic-topo-metric representation guided llm reasoning. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2410.08500

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [166] Pan R., Xu S. and Brigade S. (2017). Multi-uav cooperative navigation algorithm based on geometric characteristics. J. Ordnance Equip. Eng. 38:55−59.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [167] Horyna J., Kratky V., Pritzl V., et al. (2024). Fast swarming of uavs in gnss-denied feature-poor environments without explicit communication. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 9:5284−5291. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2024.3387830

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [168] Zhang L., Cao X., Su M., et al. (2025). Collaborative integrated navigation for unmanned aerial vehicle swarms under multiple uncertainties. Sensors. 25:617. DOI:10.3390/s25030617

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [169] Braik M., Al-Hiary H., Alzoubi H., et al. (2025). Tornado optimizer with coriolis force: A novel bio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm for solving engineering problems. Artif. Intell. Rev. 58:123. DOI:10.1007/s10462-025-11118-9

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [170] Zhou Z., Zhang Z., Peng X., et al. (2021). A collaborative path planning method for multi-uav based on conflict-based search. Patent. CN113885567A.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [171] Tang H., Sun W., Lü L., et al. (2024). Unmanned aerial vehicle formation path planning method based on dynamic reward strategy. Syst. Eng. Electron. 46:3506−3518. DOI:10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2024.10.27

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [172] Zhou Z., Zhang Z., Zhang Z., et al. (2021). A distributed collaborative trajectory planning method for multi-uav targets tracking in complex dynamic environment. Chin. J. Aeronaut. 34:1−13. DOI:10.1016/j.cja.2021.05.001

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [173] Chen Z., Li S., Khan A.T., et al. (2025). Competition of tribes and cooperation of members algorithm: An evolutionary computation approach for model free optimization. Expert Syst. Appl. 265:125908. DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2024.125908

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [174] Han T., Tang A., Zhou H., et al. (2022). Multi-uav cooperative trajectory planning method based on lassa algorithm. Syst. Eng. Electron. 44:233−241. DOI:10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2022.01.29

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [175] Wang Z., Zhang M., Zhang Z., et al. (2024). Uav cooperative path planning based on multi-index dynamic priority. Acta Aeronaut. Astronaut. Sin. 45:328816. DOI:10.7527/S1000-6893.2023.28816

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [176] Tong P., Yang X., Yang Y., et al. (2023). Multi-uav collaborative absolute vision positioning and navigation: A survey and discussion. Drones. 7:261. DOI:10.3390/drones7040261

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [177] Leishman R.C., McLain T.W. and Beard R.W. (2014). Relative navigation approach for vision-based aerial gps-denied navigation. J. Intell. Robot. Syst. 74:97−111. DOI:10.1007/s10846-013-9914-7

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [178] Xu H., Liu P., Chen X., et al. (2024). D2slam: Decentralized and distributed collaborative visual-inertial slam system for aerial swarm. IEEE Trans. Robot. 40:3445−3464. DOI:10.1109/TRO.2024.3411984

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [179] Wang T., Zhang Y., Liang J., et al. (2020). Multi-uav collaborative system with a feature fast matching algorithm. Front. Inf. Technol. Electron. Eng. 21:1695−1712. DOI:10.1631/FITEE.2000239

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [180] Huang H., Zhu G., Fan Z., et al. (2022). Vision-based distributed multi-uav collision avoidance via deep reinforcement learning for navigation. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. 2022:13745–13752. DOI:10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981803

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [181] Mo K., Chu L., Zhang X., et al. (2024). Dral: Deep reinforcement adaptive learning for multi-uavs navigation in unknown indoor environment. IEEE Int. Conf. Mechatron. Control Eng. 2024:1–6. DOI:10.1109/MCTE62870.2024.00012

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [182] Xu Y., Wei Y., Jiang K., et al. (2023). Multiple uavs path planning based on deep reinforcement learning in communication denial environment. Mathematics. 11:405. DOI:10.3390/math11020405

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [183] Wang J., Yu Z., Zhou D., et al. (2024). Vision-based deep reinforcement learning of uav autonomous navigation using privileged information. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2412.06313

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [184] Duffy J.P., Cunliffe A.M., DeBell L., et al. (2018). Location, location, location: Considerations when using lightweight drones in challenging environments. Remote Sens. Ecol. Conserv. 4:7−19. DOI:10.1002/rse2.89

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [185] Zhu P., Wen L., Bian X., et al. (2018). Vision meets drones: A challenge. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.1804.07437

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [186] Couturier A. and Akhloufi M.A. (2021). A review on absolute visual localization for uav. Robot. Auton. Syst. 135:103666. DOI:10.1016/j.robot.2020.103666

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [187] Russell J.S., Ye M., Anderson B.D.O., et al. (2020). Cooperative localization of a gps-denied uav using direction-of-arrival measurements. IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst. 56:1966−1978. DOI:10.1109/TAES.2019.2950136

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [188] Hou Y., Zhang H. and Zhou S. (2015). Convolutional neural network-based image representation for visual loop closure detection. IEEE Int. Conf. Inf. Autom. 2015:2238–2245. DOI:10.1109/ICInfA.2015.7279665

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [189] Al-Jarrah O.Y., Shatnawi A.S., Shurman M.M., et al. (2024). Exploring deep learning-based visual localization techniques for uavs in gps-denied environments. IEEE Access. 12:113049−113071. DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3439350

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [190] Sautenkov O., Yaqoot Y., Lykov A., et al. (2025). Uav-vla: Vision-language-action system for large scale aerial mission generation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2501.05014

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [191] Ding X., Zhang X., Ma N., et al. (2021). Repvgg: Making vgg-style convnets great again. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2021:13733–13742. DOI:10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.01352

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [192] Shuvo M.M.H., Islam S.K., Cheng J., et al. (2023). Efficient acceleration of deep learning inference on resource-constrained edge devices: A review. Proc. IEEE. 111:42−91. DOI:10.1109/JPROC.2022.3226530

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [193] Huang X. (2025). The small-drone revolution is coming — scientists need to ensure it will be safe. Nature. 637:29−30. DOI:10.1038/d41586-024-04167-7

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [194] Jin W., Yang J., Fang Y., et al. (2020). Research on application and deployment of uav in emergency response. IEEE Int. Conf. Electron. Inf. Emerg. Commun. 2020:277–280. DOI:10.1109/ICEIEC49280.2020.9152338

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [195] Wolfe V., Frobe W., Shrinivasan V., et al. (2015). Detecting and locating cell phone signals from avalanche victims using unmanned aerial vehicles. Int. Conf. Unmanned Aircr. Syst. 2015:704–713. DOI:10.1109/ICUAS.2015.7152352

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [196] Bejiga M.B., Zeggada A. and Melgani F. (2016). Convolutional neural networks for near real-time object detection from uav imagery in avalanche search and rescue operations. IEEE Int. Geosci. Remote Sens. Symp. 2016:693–696. DOI:10.1109/IGARSS.2016.7729163

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [197] Martinez-Alpiste I., Golcarenarenji G., Wang Q., et al. (2021). Search and rescue operation using uavs: A case study. Expert Syst. Appl. 178:114937. DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2021.114937

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [198] Jo D. and Kwon Y. (2017). Development of rescue material transport uav (unmanned aerial vehicle). World J. Eng. Technol. 5:720−729. DOI:10.4236/wjet.2017.54061

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [199] Zhang X., Zhao H., Zhang J., et al. (2023). Cooperative trajectory design of multiple uav base stations with heterogeneous graph neural networks. IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. 22:1495−1509. DOI:10.1109/TWC.2022.3204794

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [200] Yuan X., Zhang J., Zhao J., et al. (2024). Poster abstract: Emergency networking using uavs: A reinforcement learning approach with large language model. Int. Conf. Inf. Process. Sensor Netw. 2024:287–288. DOI:10.1109/IPSN61024.2024.00056

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [201] Yong S.P. and Yeong Y.C. (2018). Human object detection in forest with deep learning based on drone’s vision. Int. Conf. Comput. Inf. Sci. 2018:1–5. DOI:10.1109/ICCOINS.2018.8510564

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [202] Menouar H., Guvenc I., Akkaya K., et al. (2017). Uav-enabled intelligent transportation systems for the smart city: Applications and challenges. IEEE Commun. Mag. 55:22−28. DOI:10.1109/MCOM.2017.1600238CM

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [203] Telikani A., Sarkar A., Du B., et al. (2024). Machine learning for uav-aided its: A review with comparative study. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 25:15388−15406. DOI:10.1109/TITS.2024.3422039

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [204] Du Q., Dong W., Su W., et al. (2022). Uav inspection technology and application of transmission line. IEEE Int. Conf. Inf. Syst. Comput. Aided Educ. 2022:594–597. DOI:10.1109/ICISCAE57069.2022.10075457

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [205] Duan H., Shi F., Gao B., et al. (2025). A novel real-time intelligent detector for monitoring uavs in live-line operation on 10 kv distribution networks. Intell. Robot. 5:70−87. DOI:10.20517/ir.2025.05

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [206] Ince E. (2024). Transmission line inspection with uavs: A review of technologies, applications, and challenges. Int. J. Energy Smart Grid. 9:60−69. DOI:10.23884/ijesg.2024.9.1.05

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [207] Iversen N., Schofield O.B. and Ebeid E. (2020). Locator - lightweight and low-cost autonomous drone system for overhead cable detection and soft grasping. IEEE Int. Symp. Saf. Secur. Rescue Robot. 2020:205–212. DOI:10.1109/SSRR50563.2020.9292591

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [208] Dadrass Javan F., Samadzadegan F., Toosi A., et al. (2025). Unmanned aerial geophysical remote sensing: A systematic review. Remote Sens. 17:110. DOI:10.3390/rs17010110

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [209] Iglay R.B., Jones L.R., Elmore J.E., et al. (2024). Wildlife monitoring with drones: A survey of end users. Wildl. Soc. Bull. 48:e1533. DOI:10.1002/wsb.1533

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [210] Su J., Zhu X., Li S., et al. (2023). Ai meets uavs: A survey on ai empowered uav perception systems for precision agriculture. Neurocomputing. 518:242−270. DOI:10.1016/j.neucom.2022.10.072

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [211] Kerkech M., Hafiane A. and Canals R. (2020). Vine disease detection in uav multispectral images with deep learning segmentation approach. Comput. Electron. Agric. 169:105236. DOI:10.1016/j.compag.2019.105236

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [212] Rajagopal M.K. and Sarker B.M. (2023). Artificial intelligence based drone for early disease detection and precision pesticide management in cashew farming. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2303.08556.

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [213] Zhou Y., Lao C., Yang Y., et al. (2021). Diagnosis of winter-wheat water stress based on uav-borne multispectral image texture and vegetation indices. Agric. Water Manag. 256:107076. DOI:10.1016/j.agwat.2021.107076

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [214] Huang Y., Hoffmann W.C., Lan Y., et al. (2015). Development of a low-volume sprayer for an unmanned helicopter. J. Agric. Sci. 7:148−153. DOI:10.5539/jas.v7n1p148

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [215] Shendryk Y., Sofonia J., Skocaj G., et al. (2020). Fine-scale prediction of biomass and leaf nitrogen content in sugarcane using uav lidar and multispectral imaging. Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinf. 92:102177. DOI:10.1016/j.jag.2020.102177

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [216] Huang X. (2025). The small-drone revolution is coming — scientists need to ensure it will be safe. Nature. 637:29−30. DOI:10.1038/d41586-024-04167-7

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [217] Wang L., Wang L., Qiao Z., et al. (2022). The optimization of the "uav-vehicle" joint delivery route considering mountainous cities. PLoS One. 17:e0265518. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0265518

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [218] Li X., Tupayachi J., Sharmin A., et al. (2023). Drone-aided delivery methods, challenge, and the future: A methodological review. Drones. 7:191. DOI:10.3390/drones7030191

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [219] Gaia Consulting Oy. (2021). Potential benefits of drone deliveries in Helsinki. https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/cccdb99966ab71d08af6b990e4e3ff687751122130934f82f55f960ecfcf75a987ec36a5ae4be130c482824eeb0febc6790d8346a3a707508165c045c2c74436

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [220] Awasthi S., Gramse N., Reining C., et al. (2022). Uavs for industries and supply chain management. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2212.03346

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [221] Rejeb A., Rejeb K., Simske S., et al. (2023). Drones for supply chain management and logistics: A review and research agenda. Int. J. Logist. Res. Appl. 26:708−731. DOI:10.1080/13675567.2021.1981273

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [222] Das A., Datta S., Gkioxari G., et al. (2018). Embodied question answering. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recogn. 2018:1–10. DOI:10.1109/CVPR.2018.00006

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [223] Mu Y., Zhang Q., Hu M., et al. (2023). Embodiedgpt: Vision-language pre-training via embodied chain of thought. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2305.15021

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [224] Shah D., Osiński B., Ichter B., et al. (2022). Lm-nav: Robotic navigation with large pre-trained models of language, vision, and action. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2207.04429

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [225] Wu Z., Wang Z., Xu X., et al. (2023). Embodied task planning with large language models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2307.01848

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [226] Tian H., Meng J., Zheng W.-S., et al. (2024). Loc4plan: Locating before planning for outdoor vision and language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2408.05090

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [227] Chen J., Lin B., Xu R., et al. (2024). Mapgpt: Map-guided prompting with adaptive path planning for vision-and-language navigation. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2401.07314

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [228] Hong Y., Zhen H., Chen P., et al. (2023). 3d-llm: Injecting the 3d world into large language models. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2307.12981

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [229] Luo J., Liu Y., Chen W., et al. (2025). Dspnet: Dual-vision scene perception for robust 3d question answering. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2503.03190

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [230] Saxena P., Raghuvanshi N. and Goveas N. (2025). Uav-vln: End-to-end vision language guided navigation for uavs. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2504.21432

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [231] Wang X., Yang D., Wang Z., et al. (2024). Towards realistic uav vision-language navigation: Platform, benchmark, and methodology. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2410.07087

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [232] Messaoudi F., Simon G. and Ksentini A. (2015). Dissecting games engines: The case of unity3d. Int. Workshop Netw. Syst. Support Games. 2015:1–6. DOI:10.1109/NetGames.2015.7382997

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [233] Shah S., Dey D., Lovett C., et al. (2018). Airsim: High-fidelity visual and physical simulation for autonomous vehicles. Field Serv. Robot. 2018:621–635. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-67361-5_40

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [234] Unreal Engine. (2018). Unreal engine. https://www.unrealengine.com

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [235] Yao Y., Sun C., Wang T., et al. (2024). Uav geo-localization dataset and method based on cross-view matching. Sensors. 24:6905. DOI:10.3390/s24216905

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [236] Sun Z., Liu Y., Zhu H., et al. (2025). Refdrone: A challenging benchmark for referring expression comprehension in drone scenes. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2502.00392

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [237] Xiao J., Sun Y., Shao Y., et al. (2025). Uav-on: A benchmark for open-world object goal navigation with aerial agents. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2508.00288

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [238] Wang S., Zhou D., Xie L., et al. (2025). Panogen++: Domain-adapted text-guided panoramic environment generation for vision-and-language navigation. Neural Netw. 187:107320. DOI:10.1016/j.neunet.2025.107320

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [239] Meegahapola L., Hassoune H. and Gatica-Perez D. (2024). M3bat: Unsupervised domain adaptation for multimodal mobile sensing with multi-branch adversarial training. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 8:1−30. DOI:10.1145/3659623

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [240] Mumuni A., Mumuni F. and Gerrar N.K. (2024). A survey of synthetic data augmentation methods in machine vision. Mach. Intell. Res. 21:831−869. DOI:10.1007/s11633-022-1411-7

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [241] Vettoruzzo A., Bouguelia M.-R., Vanschoren J., et al. (2024). Advances and challenges in meta-learning: A technical review. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 46:4763−4779. DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3357847

    View in Article CrossRef Google Scholar

    [242] Xu X., Li M., Tao C., et al. (2024). A survey on knowledge distillation of large language models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2402.13116

    View in Article Google Scholar

    [243] Long X., Zhao Q., Zhang K., et al. (2025). A survey: Learning embodied intelligence from physical simulators and world models. arXiv preprint. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2507.00917

    View in Article Google Scholar

  • Cite this article:

    Yao F., Liu Y., Zhang W., et al. (2025). AeroVerse-Review: Comprehensive survey on aerial embodied vision-and-language navigation. The Innovation Informatics 1:100015. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-inform.2025.100015
    Yao F., Liu Y., Zhang W., et al. (2025). AeroVerse-Review: Comprehensive survey on aerial embodied vision-and-language navigation. The Innovation Informatics 1:100015. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-inform.2025.100015

Welcome!

To request copyright permission to republish or share portions of our works, please visit Copyright Clearance Center's (CCC) Marketplace website at marketplace.copyright.com.

Figures(8)     Tables(3)

Share

  • Share the QR code with wechat scanning code to friends and circle of friends.

Article Metrics

Article views(22226) PDF downloads(3272)

Relative Articles

Cited by

Catalog

    /

    DownLoad:  Full-Size Img  PowerPoint