UAV-VLA: Vision-Language-Action System for Large Scale Aerial Mission Generation

The UAV-VLA (Visual-Language-Action) system is a tool designed to facilitate communication with aerial robots. By integrating satellite imagery processing with the Visual Language Model (VLM) and the powerful capabilities of GPT, UAV-VLA enables users to generate general flight paths-and-action plans through simple text requests. This system leverages the rich contextual information provided by satellite images, allowing for enhanced decision-making and mission planning. The combination of visual analysis by VLM and natural language processing by GPT can provide the user with the path-and-action set, making aerial operations more efficient and accessible. The newly developed method showed the difference in the length of the created trajectory in 22% and the mean error in finding the objects of interest on a map in 34.22 m by Euclidean distance in the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) approach. Additionally, the UAV-VLA system generates all flight plans in just 5 minutes and 24 seconds, making it 6.5 times faster than an experienced human operator. The code is available here: https://github.com/sautenich/uav-vla