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Deliberate Before You Fly: Vision-Guided Spatial Deliberation for UAV See-and-Reach Navigation

Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Bohang Liu, Hongjun Wang, Yang Yang, Xindi Wang, Jiande Sun
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shandong University
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Normal University

Abstract

UAV see-and-reach navigation requires an aerial agent to approach a language-specified target visible in its initial view and stop reliably near it. Existing methods typically map vision-language representations directly to action outputs without explicitly modeling intermediate fine-grained spatial decisions. This direct mapping causes semantic-control misalignment, leading to inconsistent maneuvers and unreliable termination. To address this issue, we propose DBFly, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework that introduces explicit vision-guided spatial deliberation before waypoint generation. Specifically, DBFly introduces a spatial maneuver decision chain that progressively performs target-direction anchoring, spatial diagnosis, and maneuver decision, enabling high-level maneuver intent to explicitly guide continuous waypoint generation. DBFly further constructs an implicit flight corridor by transforming the initial target-direction prior into a persistent geometric reference and deriving an online corridor state from the UAV's current position, thereby providing soft geometric guidance for spatial diagnosis and maneuver correction. In addition, DBFly develops a terminal-convergence-aware stopping strategy that characterizes terminal states through both target proximity and short-horizon motion convergence, enabling more reliable stopping near the target. Extensive experiments across seen, unseen-object, and unseen-scene test sets demonstrate that DBFly improves the success rate over the SOTA baseline by an average of 25.07 percentage points.

Overview

Overall framework of DBFly

Overall framework of DBFly.

Simulation Experiments

Representative closed-loop flight demonstrations in high-fidelity simulation environments.

Simulation Demo 1

Simulation Demo 2

Simulation Demo 3

Real-World UAV Experiments

Representative closed-loop flight demonstrations in real-world environments.

Real-World Demo 1

Instruction: Fly to the green ball on the yellow bike.

Real-World Demo 2

Instruction: Fly to the blue box in the woods.

Results Highlights

DBFly achieves consistent improvements across seen, unseen-object, and unseen-scene test settings.

+25.07
Average SR Improvement
SOTA
Benchmark Performance
Strong
Maneuver
Reliable
Termination

BibTeX

Citation information will be updated after the paper is publicly available.

@misc{xue2026dbfly,
      title={Deliberate Before You Fly: Vision-Guided Spatial Deliberation for UAV See-and-Reach Navigation}, 
      author={Fanfu Xue and En Yu and Bohang Liu and Hongjun Wang and Yang Yang and Xindi Wang and Jiande Sun},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2608.04825},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04825}, 
}