AirNavigation: Let UAV Navigation Tell Its Own Story

Abstract

Testing autonomous navigation algorithms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in real-world scenarios often entails significant safety risks. In this paper, we aim to build a flexible yet user-friendly UAV autonomous navigation simulator. Ideally, it should closely emulate real-world environments, support diverse UAV models and algorithms, and provide a flexible evaluation framework. Existing frameworks fail to satisfy all three requirements simultaneously. To this end, we present AirNavigation, an integrated simulation platform designed to support the end-to-end workflow of UAV navigation research. Specifically, our system leverages Unreal Engine to simulate highly realistic environments and diverse UAV models. It further facilitates semi-automated scene generation and multi-modal synthetic training data production. To lower the barrier of adoption, we develop a suite of user-friendly interfaces to enable seamless integration of diverse navigation algorithms. Moreover, we introduce a novel evaluation system powered by large language models to deliver personalized and fine-grained performance analysis.