Guiyong Zheng

Guiyong Zheng, Yueting Ban, Mingjie Zhang et al.

Aerial vision-language navigation (AVLN) enables UAVs to follow natural-language instructions in complex 3D environments. However, existing zero-shot AVLN methods often suffer from unstable single-stream Vision-Language Model decision-making, unreliable long-horizon progress monitoring, and a trade-off between safety and efficiency. We propose OnFly, a fully onboard, real-time framework for zero-shot AVLN. OnFly adopts a shared-perception dual-agent architecture that decouples high-frequency target generation from low-frequency progress monitoring, thereby stabilizing decision-making. It further employs a hybrid keyframe-recent-frame memory to preserve global trajectory context while maintaining KV-cache prefix stability, enabling reliable long-horizon monitoring with termination and recovery signals. In addition, a semantic-geometric verifier refines VLM-predicted targets for instruction consistency and geometric safety using VLM features and depth cues, while a receding-horizon planner generates optimized collision-free trajectories under geometric safety constraints, improving both safety and efficiency. In simulation, OnFly improves task success from 26.4% to 67.8%, compared with the strongest state-of-the-art baseline, while fully onboard real-world flights validate its feasibility for real-time deployment. The code will be released at https://github.com/Robotics-STAR-Lab/OnFly

Chengkai Wu, Ruilin Wang, Yixin Zeng et al.

Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots remains fundamentally challenging, not only due to conflicts between long-horizon planning and real-time reactivity, but also because excessively pursuing efficiency undermines reliability in uncertain environments: it impairs stable perception and the potential for compensation, while also increasing the risk of unintended contact. In this work, we present a unified framework that synergizes efficiency and reliability for continuous mobile manipulation. It features a reliability-aware trajectory planner that embeds essential elements for reliable execution into spatiotemporal optimization, generating efficient and reliability-promising global trajectories. It is coupled with a phase-dependent switching controller that seamlessly transitions between global trajectory tracking for efficiency and task-error compensation for reliability. We also investigate a hierarchical initialization that facilitates online replanning despite the complexity of long-horizon planning problems. Real-world evaluations demonstrate that our approach enables efficient and reliable completion of successive tasks under uncertainty (e.g., dynamic disturbances, perception and control errors). Moreover, the framework generalizes to tasks with diverse end-effector constraints. Compared with state-of-the-art baselines, our method consistently achieves the highest efficiency while improving the task success rate by 26.67\%--81.67\%. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component. The source code will be released.