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CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVs

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arxiv 2503.01378 v1 pith:KEK4DIGY submitted 2025-03-03 cs.RO

CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVs

classification cs.RO
keywords modelcognitivecognitivedronebenchmarkcontrolreasoningtasksadvanced
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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This paper introduces CognitiveDrone, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model tailored for complex Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) tasks that demand advanced cognitive abilities. Trained on a dataset comprising over 8,000 simulated flight trajectories across three key categories-Human Recognition, Symbol Understanding, and Reasoning-the model generates real-time 4D action commands based on first-person visual inputs and textual instructions. To further enhance performance in intricate scenarios, we propose CognitiveDrone-R1, which integrates an additional Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning module to simplify task directives prior to high-frequency control. Experimental evaluations using our open-source benchmark, CognitiveDroneBench, reveal that while a racing-oriented model (RaceVLA) achieves an overall success rate of 31.3%, the base CognitiveDrone model reaches 59.6%, and CognitiveDrone-R1 attains a success rate of 77.2%. These results demonstrate improvements of up to 30% in critical cognitive tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities into UAV control systems. Our contributions include the development of a state-of-the-art VLA model for UAV control and the introduction of the first dedicated benchmark for assessing cognitive tasks in drone operations. The complete repository is available at cognitivedrone.github.io

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  2. Vision Language Action (VLA) Models for Unmanned Aerial Robotics and Bimanual Manipulation: A Review

    cs.RO 2026-07 accept novelty 5.5

    Bimanual VLA coordination strategies, training recipes, and continuous action chunking transfer to unmanned aerial systems; the survey maps 183 works and lists fourteen shared research directions.

  3. PEACE: A Planner-Executor Agent with Constraint Enforcement for UAVs

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  4. Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey of UAV vision-and-language navigation that establishes a methodological taxonomy, reviews resources and challenges, and proposes a forward-looking research roadmap.

  5. GRaD-Nav++: Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics

    cs.RO 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

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