Towards Lifelong Aerial Autonomy: Geometric Memory Management for Continual Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Environments

Robust geo-localization in changing environmental conditions is critical for long-term aerial autonomy. While visual place recognition (VPR) models perform well when airborne views match the training domain, adapting them to shifting distributions during sequential missions triggers catastrophic forgetting. Existing continual learning (CL) methods often fail here because geographic features exhibit severe intra-class variations. In this work, we formulate aerial VPR as a mission-based domain-incremental learning (DIL) problem and propose a novel heterogeneous memory framework. To respect strict onboard storage constraints, our "Learn-and-Dispose" pipeline decouples geographic knowledge into static satellite anchors (preserving global geometric priors) and a dynamic experience replay buffer (retaining domain-specific features). We introduce a spatially-constrained allocation strategy that optimizes buffer selection based on sample difficulty or feature space diversity. To facilitate systematic assessment, we provide three evaluation criteria and a comprehensive benchmark derived from 21 diverse mission sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our architecture significantly boosts spatial generalization; our diversity-driven buffer selection outperforms the random baseline by 7.8% in knowledge retention. Unlike class-mean preservation methods that fail in unstructured environments, maximizing structural diversity achieves a superior plasticity-stability balance and ensures order-agnostic robustness across randomized sequences. These results prove that maintaining structural feature coverage is more critical than sample difficulty for resolving catastrophic forgetting in lifelong aerial autonomy.

DRIVE-Nav: Directional Reasoning, Inspection, and Verification for Efficient Open-Vocabulary Navigation

Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation (OVON) requires an embodied agent to locate a language-specified target in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot methods often reason over dense frontier points under incomplete observations, causing unstable route selection, repeated revisits, and unnecessary action overhead. We present DRIVE-Nav, a structured framework that organizes exploration around persistent directions rather than raw frontiers. By inspecting encountered directions more completely and restricting subsequent decisions to still-relevant directions within a forward 240 degree view range, DRIVE-Nav reduces redundant revisits and improves path efficiency. The framework extracts and tracks directional candidates from weighted Fast Marching Method (FMM) paths, maintains representative views for semantic inspection, and combines vision-language-guided prompt enrichment with cross-frame verification to improve grounding reliability. Experiments on HM3D-OVON, HM3Dv2, and MP3D demonstrate strong overall performance and consistent efficiency gains. On HM3D-OVON, DRIVE-Nav achieves 50.2% SR and 32.6% SPL, improving the previous best method by 1.9% SR and 5.6% SPL. It also delivers the best SPL on HM3Dv2 and MP3D and transfers to a physical humanoid robot. Real-world deployment also demonstrates its effectiveness. Project page: https://coolmaoguo.github.io/drive-nav-page/

Topology-Inspired Morphological Descriptor for Soft Continuum Robots

This paper presents a topology-inspired morphological descriptor for soft continuum robots by combining a pseudo-rigid-body (PRB) model with Morse theory to achieve a quantitative characterization of robot morphologies. By counting critical points of directional projections, the proposed descriptor enables a discrete representation of multimodal configurations and facilitates morphological classification. Furthermore, we apply the descriptor to morphology control by formulating the target configuration as an optimization problem to compute actuation parameters that generate equilibrium shapes with desired topological features. The proposed framework provides a unified methodology for quantitative morphology description, classification, and control of soft continuum robots, with the potential to enhance their precision and adaptability in medical applications such as minimally invasive surgery and endovascular interventions.

Closed-Loop Magnetic Control of Medical Soft Continuum Robots for Deflection

Magnetic soft continuum robots (MSCRs) have emerged as powerful devices in endovascular interventions owing to their hyperelastic fibre matrix and enhanced magnetic manipulability. Effective closed-loop control of tethered magnetic devices contributes to the achievement of autonomous vascular robotic surgery. In this article, we employ a magnetic actuation system equipped with a single rotatable permanent magnet to achieve closed-loop deflection control of the MSCR. To this end, we establish a differential kinematic model of MSCRs exposed to non-uniform magnetic fields. The relationship between the existence and uniqueness of Jacobian and the geometric position between robots is deduced. The accurate control direction induced by Jacobian is demonstrated to be crucial in simulations. Then, the corresponding quasi-static control (QSC) framework integrates a linear extended state observer to estimate model uncertainties. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed QSC framework is validated through comparative trajectory tracking experiments with the PD controller under external disturbances. The proposed control framework effectively prevents the actuator from reaching the joint limit and achieves fast and low error-tracking performance without overshooting.