NEUROSYMLAND: Neuro-Symbolic Landing-Site Assessment for Robust and Edge-Deployable UAV Autonomy
For autonomous UAV deployment in unstructured environments, this work provides a robust and interpretable landing-site assessment system that is deployable on edge hardware, addressing safety and transparency limitations of vision-only methods.
NEUROSYMLAND integrates lightweight perception with symbolic reasoning for UAV landing-site assessment, achieving 61 successful assessments out of 72 simulated scenarios, outperforming baselines (37-57 successes), and demonstrating edge-deployable feasibility with bounded resource usage.
Safe landing-site assessment in unstructured environments remains a key challenge for autonomous UAV deployment, as vision-only learning approaches often degrade under terrain variability and provide limited transparency in safety decisions. We present NEUROSYMLAND, a neuro-symbolic landing-site assessment system that integrates lightweight perception with explicit safety reasoning. The framework constructs a probabilistic semantic scene graph from onboard visual input and evaluates candidate landing regions using symbolic constraints capturing terrain flatness, obstacle clearance, and spatial consistency, enabling structured reasoning under perceptual uncertainty while maintaining edge-feasible execution. Across 72 simulated landing scenarios spanning diverse terrains, NEUROSYMLAND achieves 61 successful assessments, outperforming four competitive baselines (37-57 successes). To evaluate deployability, we further conduct 100 hardware-in-the-loop trials with randomized initial poses, profiling end-to-end latency, stage-wise execution time, and system-level metrics including CPU/GPU utilization, memory footprint, and power consumption. Results demonstrate improved robustness and interpretability with bounded edge-resource usage. Profiling shows that symbolic reasoning contributes only a small fraction of end-to-end latency, while the main computational cost arises from perception and PSSG construction. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying the landing-site assessment stack on edge-constrained UAV hardware, and all source code, datasets, prompts, and symbolic rule refinement examples are released in an open-source repository