FlowPilot: Real-Time World-Action Modeling for Agile UAV Navigation

Abstract

We present FlowPilot, a compact world-action model for real-time onboard UAV navigation from depth. Unlike map-then-optimize pipelines that require local reconstruction or end-to-end policies that lack explicit scene prediction, FlowPilot jointly denoises future depth observations and executable trajectories with flow matching. A dual-stream mixture-of-transformers couples video and action experts through shared attention, allowing future-scene prediction and trajectory generation to inform each other. At deployment, the model runs action-centrically and outputs only a trajectory. To ensure trackability, actions are parameterized as degree-7 Bernstein polynomials: the current state constrains the initial control points, and the network predicts five free control points, yielding C^2-continuous references with closed-form velocity, acceleration and jerk. FlowPilot is trained on a three-level depth pyramid spanning high-throughput simulation, photorealistic simulation, and real onboard data. In closed-loop simulation, it outperforms learning- and optimization-based baselines under increasing clutter and commanded speeds up to 8m/s. On a physical quadrotor, the full perception-to-action pipeline runs in under 18ms on a Jetson Orin NX and reaches 5.5m/s in cluttered indoor and forest environments using only onboard sensing and computation.