Poster Thu, Apr 23, 2026 • 11:15 AM – 1:45 PM PDT Pavilion 3 P3-#1306

OpenFly: A COMPREHENSIVE PLATFORM FOR AERIAL VISION-LANGUAGE NAVIGATION

Yunpeng Gao ⋅ Chenhui Li ⋅ Zhongrui You ⋅ Junli Liu ⋅ Li Zhen ⋅ Pengan CHEN ⋅ Qizhi Chen ⋅ Zhonghan Tang ⋅ Liansheng Wang ⋅ Yangpenghui ⋅ Yiwen Tang ⋅ Yuhang Tang ⋅ Shuai Liang ⋅ Songyi Zhu ⋅ Ziqin Xiong ⋅ Yifei Su ⋅ Xinyi Ye ⋅ Jianan Li ⋅ Yan Ding ⋅ Dong Wang ⋅ Zhigang Wang ⋅ Bin Zhao ⋅ Xuelong Li

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Abstract

Aerial Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) seeks to guide UAVs by leveraging language instructions and visual cues, establishing a new paradigm for human-UAV interaction. However, the collection of VLN data demands extensive human effort to construct trajectories and corresponding instructions, hindering the development of large-scale datasets and capable models. To address this problem, we propose OpenFly, a comprehensive platform for aerial VLN. Firstly, OpenFly integrates 4 rendering engines and advanced techniques for diverse environment simulation, including Unreal Engine, GTA V, Google Earth, and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS). Particularly, 3D GS supports real-to-sim rendering, further enhancing the realism of our environments. Secondly, we develop a highly automated toolchain for aerial VLN data collection, streamlining point cloud acquisition, scene semantic segmentation, flight trajectory creation, and instruction generation. Thirdly, based on the toolchain, we construct a large-scale aerial VLN dataset with 100k trajectories, covering samples of diverse scenarios and assets across 18 scenes. Moreover, we propose OpenFly-Agent, a keyframe-aware VLN model emphasizing key observations to promote performance and reduce computations. For benchmarking, extensive experiments and analyses are conducted, where our navigation success rate outperforms others by 14.0\% and 7.9\% on the seen and unseen scenarios, respectively. The toolchain, dataset, and codes will be open-sourced.