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arXiv · 2609.10166

Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following

Boning Feng·Haoran Zhang·Xiaowen Bi·Yanzhen Zhang·Xiaodan Shi
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Abstract

UAV target following in cluttered environments is inherently predictive: current-state followers can lag behind turns, choose blocked corridors, or trade tracking for unsafe near-horizon motion. We propose a future-aware flow planning framework for state-informed UAV target following. Predicted target futures guide clean UAV trajectory generation as horizon-aligned residual signals, while risk-scored executable-prefix repair is embedded inside the sampling loop. On fixed ID/OOD receding-horizon benchmarks, the planner improves the intended safety--tracking trade-off rather than dominating every metric: it matches zero measured ID collision rate with the highest ID safe-tracking time, and gives the lowest OOD macro collision rate and final tracking error among the displayed methods, while Future-MPC remains smoother and stronger on some thresholded OOD success metrics under its hand-designed objective. Ablations show that future adaptation improves candidate generation before safety repair, and simulator-facing stress tests probe interface, sensing, and controller-execution effects. These results support horizon-aligned future adaptation and embedded prefix repair as complementary ingredients for safe UAV target following under the tested simulation conditions.

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Boning Feng, Haoran Zhang, Xiaowen Bi, Yanzhen Zhang, Xiaodan Shi. 2026-09-09. Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10166

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