GustPilot: A Hierarchical DRL-INDI Framework for Wind-Resilient Quadrotor Navigation

Wind disturbances remain a key barrier to reliable autonomous navigation for lightweight quadrotors, where the rapidly varying airflow can destabilize both planning and tracking. This paper introduces GustPilot, a hierarchical wind-resilient navigation stack in which a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policy generates inertial-frame velocity reference for gate traversal. At the same time, a geometric Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) controller provides low-level tracking with fast residual disturbance rejection. The INDI layer achieves this by providing incremental feedback on both specific linear acceleration and angular acceleration rate, using onboard sensor measurements to reject wind disturbances rapidly. Robustness is obtained through a two-level strategy, wind-aware planning learned via fan-jet domain randomization during training, and rapid execution-time disturbance rejection by the INDI tracking controller. We evaluate GustPilot in real flights on a 50g quad-copter platform against a DRL-PID baseline across four scenarios ranging from no-wind to fully dynamic conditions with a moving gate and a moving disturbance source. Despite being trained only in a minimal single-gate and single-fan setup, the policy generalizes to significantly more complex environments (up to six gates and four fans) without retraining. Across 80 experiments, DRL-INDI achieves a 94.7% versus 55.0% for DRL-PID as average Overall Success Rate (OSR), reduces tracking RMSE up to 50%, and sustains speeds up to 1.34 m/s under wind disturbances up to 3.5 m/s. These results demonstrate that combining DRL-based velocity planning with structured INDI disturbance rejection provides a practical and generalizable approach to wind-resilient autonomous flight navigation.

Adaptive SINDy: Residual Force System Identification Based UAV Disturbance Rejection

The stability and control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a turbulent environment is a matter of great concern. Devising a robust control algorithm to reject disturbances is challenging due to the highly nonlinear nature of wind dynamics, and modeling the dynamics using analytical techniques is not straightforward. While traditional techniques using disturbance observers and classical adaptive control have shown some progress, they are mostly limited to relatively non-complex environments. On the other hand, learning based approaches are increasingly being used for modeling of residual forces and disturbance rejection; however, their generalization and interpretability is a factor of concern. To this end, we propose a novel integration of data-driven system identification using Sparse Identification of Non-Linear Dynamics (SINDy) with a Recursive Least Square (RLS) adaptive control to adapt and reject wind disturbances in a turbulent environment. We tested and validated our approach on Gazebo harmonic environment and on real flights with wind speeds of up to 2 m/s from four directions, creating a highly dynamic and turbulent environment. Adaptive SINDy outperformed the baseline PID and INDI controllers on several trajectory tracking error metrics without crashing. A root mean square error (RMSE) of up to 12.2 cm and 17.6 cm, and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 13.7 cm and 10.5 cm were achieved on circular and lemniscate trajectories, respectively. The validation was performed on a very lightweight Crazyflie drone under a highly dynamic environment for complex trajectory tracking.

Glove2UAV: A Wearable IMU-Based Glove for Intuitive Control of UAV

This paper presents Glove2UAV, a wearable IMU-glove interface for intuitive UAV control through hand and finger gestures, augmented with vibrotactile warnings for exceeding predefined speed thresholds. To promote safer and more predictable interaction in dynamic flight, Glove2UAV is designed as a lightweight and easily deployable wearable interface intended for real-time operation. Glove2UAV streams inertial measurements in real time and estimates palm and finger orientations using a compact processing pipeline that combines median-based outlier suppression with Madgwick-based orientation estimation. The resulting motion estimations are mapped to a small set of control primitives for directional flight (forward/backward and lateral motion) and, when supported by the platform, to object-interaction commands. Vibrotactile feedback is triggered when flight speed exceeds predefined threshold values, providing an additional alert channel during operation. We validate real-time feasibility by synchronizing glove signals with UAV telemetry in both simulation and real-world flights. The results show fast gesture-based command execution, stable coupling between gesture dynamics and platform motion, correct operation of the core command set in our trials, and timely delivery of vibratile warning cues.

DroneVLA: VLA based Aerial Manipulation

As aerial platforms evolve from passive observers to active manipulators, the challenge shifts toward designing intuitive interfaces that allow non-expert users to command these systems naturally. This work introduces a novel concept of autonomous aerial manipulation system capable of interpreting high-level natural language commands to retrieve objects and deliver them to a human user. The system is intended to integrate a MediaPipe based on Grounding DINO and a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with a custom-built drone equipped with a 1-DOF gripper and an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera. VLA performs semantic reasoning to interpret the intent of a user prompt and generates a prioritized task queue for grasping of relevant objects in the scene. Grounding DINO and dynamic A* planning algorithm are used to navigate and safely relocate the object. To ensure safe and natural interaction during the handover phase, the system employs a human-centric controller driven by MediaPipe. This module provides real-time human pose estimation, allowing the drone to employ visual servoing to maintain a stable, distinct position directly in front of the user, facilitating a comfortable handover. We demonstrate the system's efficacy through real-world experiments for localization and navigation, which resulted in a 0.164m, 0.070m, and 0.084m of max, mean euclidean, and root-mean squared errors, respectively, highlighting the feasibility of VLA for aerial manipulation operations.

HoverAI: An Embodied Aerial Agent for Natural Human-Drone Interaction

Drones operating in human-occupied spaces suffer from insufficient communication mechanisms that create uncertainty about their intentions. We present HoverAI, an embodied aerial agent that integrates drone mobility, infrastructure-independent visual projection, and real-time conversational AI into a unified platform. Equipped with a MEMS laser projector, onboard semi-rigid screen, and RGB camera, HoverAI perceives users through vision and voice, responding via lip-synced avatars that adapt appearance to user demographics. The system employs a multimodal pipeline combining VAD, ASR (Whisper), LLM-based intent classification, RAG for dialogue, face analysis for personalization, and voice synthesis (XTTS v2). Evaluation demonstrates high accuracy in command recognition (F1: 0.90), demographic estimation (gender F1: 0.89, age MAE: 5.14 years), and speech transcription (WER: 0.181). By uniting aerial robotics with adaptive conversational AI and self-contained visual output, HoverAI introduces a new class of spatially-aware, socially responsive embodied agents for applications in guidance, assistance, and human-centered interaction.