RAVEN: Resilient Aerial Navigation via Open-Set Semantic Memory and Behavior Adaptation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23563v1
• Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2025 01:43:25 GMT
• Title: RAVEN: Resilient Aerial Navigation via Open-Set Semantic Memory and Behavior Adaptation
• Authors: Seungchan Kim, Omar Alama, Dmytro Kurdydyk, John Keller, Nikhil Keetha, Wenshan Wang, Yonatan Bisk, Sebastian Scherer,
• Abstract summary: RAVEN is a 3D memory-based, behavior tree framework for aerial semantic navigation in unstructured outdoor environments.<n>It uses a spatially consistent semantic voxel-ray map as persistent memory, enabling long-horizon planning and avoiding purely reactive behaviors.<n>RAVEN outperforms baselines by 85.25% in simulation and demonstrate its real-world applicability through deployment on an aerial robot in outdoor field tests.
• Score: 20.730528223747967
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Aerial outdoor semantic navigation requires robots to explore large, unstructured environments to locate target objects. Recent advances in semantic navigation have demonstrated open-set object-goal navigation in indoor settings, but these methods remain limited by constrained spatial ranges and structured layouts, making them unsuitable for long-range outdoor search. While outdoor semantic navigation approaches exist, they either rely on reactive policies based on current observations, which tend to produce short-sighted behaviors, or precompute scene graphs offline for navigation, limiting adaptability to online deployment. We present RAVEN, a 3D memory-based, behavior tree framework for aerial semantic navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. It (1) uses a spatially consistent semantic voxel-ray map as persistent memory, enabling long-horizon planning and avoiding purely reactive behaviors, (2) combines short-range voxel search and long-range ray search to scale to large environments, (3) leverages a large vision-language model to suggest auxiliary cues, mitigating sparsity of outdoor targets. These components are coordinated by a behavior tree, which adaptively switches behaviors for robust operation. We evaluate RAVEN in 10 photorealistic outdoor simulation environments over 100 semantic tasks, encompassing single-object search, multi-class, multi-instance navigation and sequential task changes. Results show RAVEN outperforms baselines by 85.25% in simulation and demonstrate its real-world applicability through deployment on an aerial robot in outdoor field tests.

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