AerialVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Navigation via Minimalist End-to-End Control

Researchers propose AerialVLA, a minimalist end-to-end Vision-Language-Action framework for UAV navigation that directly maps visual observations and linguistic instructions to continuous control signals. The system eliminates reliance on external object detectors and dense oracle guidance, achieving nearly three times the success rate of existing baselines in unseen environments.