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.
Simulation Experiments
Representative closed-loop flight demonstrations in high-fidelity simulation environments.
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.
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},
}