Kangyao Huang

Le Shen, Kangyao Huang, Wentao Zhao et al.

In the automated co-design of soft robots, precisely adapting the material stiffness field to task environments is crucial for unlocking their full physical potential. However, mainstream platforms (e.g., EvoGym) strictly discretize the material dimension, artificially restricting the design space and performance of soft robots. To address this, we propose EvoGymCM (EvoGym with Continuous Materials), a benchmark suite formally establishing continuous material stiffness as a first-class design variable alongside morphology and control. Aligning with real-world material mechanisms, EvoGymCM introduces two settings: (i) EvoGymCM-R (Reactive), motivated by programmable materials with dynamically tunable stiffness; and (ii) EvoGymCM-I (Invariant), motivated by traditional materials with invariant stiffness fields. To tackle the resulting high-dimensional coupling, we formulate two Morphology-Material-Control co-design paradigms: (i) Reactive-Material Co-Design, which learns real-time stiffness tuning policies to guide programmable materials; and (ii) Invariant-Material Co-Design, which jointly optimizes morphology and fixed material fields to guide traditional material fabrication. Systematic experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that continuous material optimization boosts performance and unlocks synergy across morphology, material, and control.

Wen Jiang, Li Wang, Kangyao Huang et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are crucial tools for post-disaster search and rescue, facing challenges such as high information density, rapid changes in viewpoint, and dynamic structures, especially in long-horizon navigation. However, current UAV vision-and-language navigation(VLN) methods struggle to model long-horizon spatiotemporal context in complex environments, resulting in inaccurate semantic alignment and unstable path planning. To this end, we propose LongFly, a spatiotemporal context modeling framework for long-horizon UAV VLN. LongFly proposes a history-aware spatiotemporal modeling strategy that transforms fragmented and redundant historical data into structured, compact, and expressive representations. First, we propose the slot-based historical image compression module, which dynamically distills multi-view historical observations into fixed-length contextual representations. Then, the spatiotemporal trajectory encoding module is introduced to capture the temporal dynamics and spatial structure of UAV trajectories. Finally, to integrate existing spatiotemporal context with current observations, we design the prompt-guided multimodal integration module to support time-based reasoning and robust waypoint prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that LongFly outperforms state-of-the-art UAV VLN baselines by 7.89\% in success rate and 6.33\% in success weighted by path length, consistently across both seen and unseen environments.

Wen Jiang, Hanfang Liang, Li Wang et al.

Recent advances in multimodal large models have significantly improved UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) by enhancing high-level perception and reasoning. However, existing methods mainly focus on predicting discrete actions, local targets, or sparse waypoints, while the continuous transition from navigation intent to executable UAV motion remains weakly modeled. This motion-interface gap limits the continuity, stability, and executability of generated UAV trajectories. To address this gap, we propose DynFly, a dynamic-aware continuous trajectory generation framework that bridges high-level navigation reasoning and executable UAV motion. DynFly bridges high-level navigation intent and continuous UAV motion through a lightweight trajectory generation layer. Specifically, it represents expert trajectories in B-spline control-point space and employs a Spline-DiT generator to learn conditional trajectory generation via flow matching. Furthermore, we introduce UAV-oriented dynamic-aware supervision over position, finite-difference velocity, finite-difference acceleration, heading consistency, and local target alignment, enabling the generated trajectories to better satisfy UAV motion characteristics. And our trajectory generation framework can also be integrated with an existing UAV-VLN framework while preserving its original visual-language reasoning pipeline. Extensive experiments on the OpenUAV UAV-VLN benchmark show that DynFly improves both navigation performance and trajectory quality. On the Test Unseen Full split, DynFly improves the strongest baseline by 4.69 NDTW, 2.40 SDTW, 2.14 SR points and 4.87 OSR points, while reducing NE by 4.51 m.

Kangyao Huang, Di Guo, Xinyu Zhang et al.

It is common for us to feel pressure in a competition environment, which arises from the desire to obtain success comparing with other individuals or opponents. Although we might get anxious under the pressure, it could also be a drive for us to stimulate our potentials to the best in order to keep up with others. Inspired by this, we propose a competitive learning framework which is able to help individual robot to acquire knowledge from the competition, fully stimulating its dynamics potential in the race. Specifically, the competition information among competitors is introduced as the additional auxiliary signal to learn advantaged actions. We further build a Multiagent-Race environment, and extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating that robots trained in competitive environments outperform ones that are trained with SoTA algorithms in single robot environment.

Xiaoyu Wang, Kangyao Huang, Xinyu Zhang et al.

An innovative sort of mobility platform that can both drive and fly is the air-ground robot. The need for an agile flight cannot be satisfied by traditional path planning techniques for air-ground robots. Prior studies had mostly focused on improving the energy efficiency of paths, seldom taking the seeking speed and optimizing take-off and landing places into account. A robot for the field application environment was proposed, and a lightweight global spatial planning technique for the robot based on the graph-search algorithm taking mode switching point optimization into account, with an emphasis on energy efficiency, searching speed, and the viability of real deployment. The fundamental concept is to lower the computational burden by employing an interchangeable search approach that combines planar and spatial search. Furthermore, to safeguard the health of the power battery and the integrity of the mission execution, a trap escape approach was also provided. Simulations are run to test the effectiveness of the suggested model based on the field DEM map. The simulation results show that our technology is capable of producing finished, plausible 3D paths with a high degree of believability. Additionally, the mode-switching point optimization method efficiently identifies additional acceptable places for mode switching, and the improved paths use less time and energy.