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KiteRunner: Language-Driven Cooperative Local-Global Navigation Policy with UAV Mapping in Outdoor Environments

  • Shibo Huang
  • , Chenfan Shi
  • , Jian Yang*
  • , Hanlin Dong
  • , Jinpeng Mi
  • , Ke Li
  • , Jianfeng Zhang
  • , Miao Ding
  • , Peidong Liang
  • , Xiong You
  • , Xian Wei*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • East China Normal University
  • Information Engineering University
  • University of Shanghai for Science and Technology
  • Liaoning Technical University
  • Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Autonomous navigation in open-world outdoor environments faces challenges in integrating dynamic conditions, long-distance spatial reasoning, and semantic understanding. Traditional methods struggle to balance local planning, global planning, and semantic task execution, while existing large language models (LLMs) enhance semantic comprehension but lack spatial reasoning capabilities. Although diffusion models excel in local optimization, they fall short in large-scale long-distance navigation. To address these gaps, this paper proposes KiteRunner, a language-driven cooperative local-global navigation strategy that combines UAV orthophoto-based global planning with diffusion model-driven local path generation for long-distance navigation in open-world scenarios. Our method innovatively leverages real-time UAV orthophotography to construct a global probability map, providing traversability guidance for the local planner, while integrating large models like CLIP and GPT to interpret natural language instructions. Experiments demonstrate that KiteRunner achieves 5.6% and 12.8% improvements in path efficiency over state-of-the-art methods in structured and unstructured environments, respectively, with significant reductions in human interventions and execution time.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIROS 2025 - 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Conference Proceedings
EditorsChristian Laugier, Alessandro Renzaglia, Nikolay Atanasov, Stan Birchfield, Grzegorz Cielniak, Leonardo De Mattos, Laura Fiorini, Philippe Giguere, Kenji Hashimoto, Javier Ibanez-Guzman, Tetsushi Kamegawa, Jinoh Lee, Giuseppe Loianno, Kevin Luck, Hisataka Maruyama, Philippe Martinet, Hadi Moradi, Urbano Nunes, Julien Pettre, Alberto Pretto, Tommaso Ranzani, Arne Ronnau, Silvia Rossi, Elliott Rouse, Fabio Ruggiero, Olivier Simonin, Danwei Wang, Ming Yang, Eiichi Yoshida, Huijing Zhao
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages18512-18519
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798331543938
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2025 - Hangzhou, China
Duration: 19 Oct 202525 Oct 2025

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2025
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHangzhou
Period19/10/2525/10/25

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