Vision-Guided Outdoor Flight and Obstacle Evasion via Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24449v1
• Date: Sat, 23 May 2026 07:41:13 GMT
• Title: Vision-Guided Outdoor Flight and Obstacle Evasion via Reinforcement Learning
• Abstract summary: We propose a novel sensorimotor policy that uses stereo-vision depth and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to autonomously navigate through obstacles in an unknown environment to reach a goal point.<n>We leverage reinforcement and privileged learning paradigms to train the policy in simulation through a two-stage process.<n>In outdoor experiments, our approach achieves successful zero-shot transfer to both obstacle environments and a drone platform that were never encountered during training.
• Score: 2.6769278955255267
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel sensorimotor policy that uses stereo-vision depth and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to autonomously navigate through obstacles in an unknown environment to reach a goal point. The policy is comprised of a pre-trained autoencoder as the perception head followed by a planning and control LSTM network which outputs velocity commands that can be followed by an off-the-shelf commercial drone. We leverage reinforcement and privileged learning paradigms to train the policy in simulation through a two-stage process: 1) initial training with optimal trajectories generated by a global motion planner acting as a supervisory backbone, 2) further fine-tuning in a curriculum environment. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we employ domain randomization and reward shaping to create a policy that is both robust to noise and domain shift. In outdoor experiments, our approach achieves successful zero-shot transfer to both obstacle environments and a drone platform that were never encountered during training.

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