# VLN on the Fly: An Onboard Vision-Language Navigation Stack for Aerial Robots

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-27T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/rnmom72rpgnzdjzrm7y6a0n1b
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20191

## Summary

The authors propose VLN on the Fly, an onboard vision-language navigation stack that keeps instruction grounding, planning, and control as separately inspectable stages: a quantized VLM grounds the instruction to a coarse image cell, depth lifts it to a 3D goal, a fast B-spline planner generates a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy tracks the trajectory and outputs motor commands across multiple quadrotors.