Recently emerged Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks have drawn significant attention in both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Existing VLN tasks are built for agents that navigate on the ground, either indoors or outdoors. However, many tasks require intelligent agents to carry out in the sky, such as UAV-based goods delivery, traffic/security patrol, and scenery tour, to name a few. Navigating in the sky is more complicated than on the ground because agents need to consider the flying height and more complex spatial relationship reasoning. To fill this gap and facilitate research in this field, we propose a new task named AerialVLN, which is UAV-based and towards outdoor environments. We develop a 3D simulator rendered by near-realistic pictures of 25 city-level scenarios. Our simulator supports continuous navigation, environment extension and configuration. We also proposed an extended baseline model based on the widely-used cross-modal-alignment (CMA) navigation methods. We find that there is still a significant gap between the baseline model and human performance, which suggests AerialVLN is a new challenging task. Dataset and code is available at https://github.com/AirVLN/AirVLN.

提出了一项名为AerialVLN的新任务，基于无人机（UAV）的、面向室外环境的导航，在提出的3D模拟器中使用高度逼真的城市景观照片进行连续导航并进行环境扩展和配置，基于跨模态对齐（CMA）导航方法的扩展基线模型，发现基线模型与人类表现之间仍存在显著差距，表明AerialVLN是一项具有挑战性的新任务。

无人机视觉与语言导航：AerialVLN