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arXiv · 2610.36968

Omni-IGN: Onboard Image-Goal Navigation for Drones with Omnidirectional Vision

Zichen Yan·Rui Huang·Shenao Wang·Yucong Wang·Nuthasith Gerdpratoom·Lin Zhao
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Abstract

Image-goal navigation (ImageNav) requires an agent to reach a location specified by a goal image in an unknown environment. For drones, this task demands exploration, goal- directed navigation, and collision avoidance under limited onboard computing resources. Existing aerial ImageNav methods are built on single-view observations, requiring additional rotation and exploration to search for goal-relevant cues outside the field of view. In this paper, we present Omni-IGN, a fully onboard ImageNav system that integrates quad-fisheye perception, an attention-based reinforcement learning (RL) policy, and a collision-aware safety layer. The policy adaptively fuses goal-relevant features across multiple views to provide directional guidance for continuous navigation. The quad-fisheye RGB images support both ImageNav and obstacle avoidance without a dedicated depth sensor. On Habitat benchmarks, Omni-IGN achieves the best performance among continuous-action baselines. Moreover, flight tests in IsaacSim validate the effectiveness of integrating learning-based depth estimation with the action safety layer for collision avoidance. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer without any fine-tuning or external localization. The code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

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Zichen Yan, Rui Huang, Shenao Wang, Yucong Wang, Nuthasith Gerdpratoom, Lin Zhao. 2026-10-27. Omni-IGN: Onboard Image-Goal Navigation for Drones with Omnidirectional Vision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36968

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