arXiv subjects

Marco S. Tayar

Publications and source records attributed to Marco S. Tayar.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

VLN on the Fly: An Onboard Vision-Language Navigation Stack for Aerial Robots

Running vision-language navigation fully onboard an aerial robot is hard, since grounding, planning, and control must share limited compute and a single-stage error is difficult to isolate in flight. End-to-end aerial policies fuse these stages into one network, giving up the observability and safety checks a modular stack keeps available. We propose VLN on the Fly, an onboard stack that keeps grounding, planning, and control as separate, inspectable stages. A quantized VLM grounds an instruction to a coarse image cell, depth lifts it to a 3D goal, a fast B-spline planner returns a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy tracks it to motor commands across quadrotors. Across 15 onboard flights over three everyday referents in a controlled indoor volume, the stack reaches the target in 13 of 15 trials with 5.72 cm mean goal error and 39.3% average GPU utilization. In 6 additional cluttered-environment trials, the stack tracks collision-free trajectories under onboard perception gating.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MIRA: A Modular Open-Source Micro-UAV for Indoor Research

Indoor robotics research increasingly uses micro-UAV platforms whose airframes, electronics, and control software are open to modification. Off-the-shelf platforms often lack the low-level access required for such modifications, while building a custom alternative requires initial engineering effort before flight testing can begin, leaving many laboratories to work within constraints that limit the scope of their research. We present MIRA (Modular Indoor Research Architecture), a low-cost, open-source micro-UAV for indoor research, built around a replicable 3D-printed PLA airframe and a containerized low-level software package that manages the companion-to-autopilot communication bridge via Micro XRCE-DDS. Designed as a white-box architecture, core subsystems are individually replaceable without firmware refactoring, supporting local fabrication and component substitution from existing lab inventory. We characterize MIRA through autonomous flight evaluations, including sequences of takeoff, trajectory tracking, hovering, and landing, within an optical motion-capture volume. The communication pipeline sustains a median companion-to-autopilot latency of 0.02 ms, and time-domain analysis shows that structural vibration levels remain stable and within recommended autopilot safety thresholds during dynamic maneuvers.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Autonomous UAV Flight Navigation in Confined Spaces: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Autonomous UAV inspection of confined industrial infrastructure, such as ventilation ducts, demands robust navigation policies where collisions are unacceptable. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a powerful paradigm for developing such policies, it presents a critical trade-off between on-policy and off-policy algorithms. Off-policy methods promise high sample efficiency, a vital trait for minimizing costly and unsafe real-world fine-tuning. In contrast, on-policy methods often exhibit greater training stability, which is essential for reliable convergence in hazard-dense environments. This paper directly investigates this trade-off by comparing a leading on-policy algorithm, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), against an off-policy counterpart, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), for precision flight in procedurally generated ducts within a high-fidelity simulator. Our results show that PPO consistently learned a stable, collision-free policy that completed the entire course. In contrast, SAC failed to find a complete solution, converging to a suboptimal policy that navigated only the initial segments before failure. This work provides evidence that for high-precision, safety-critical navigation tasks, the reliable convergence of a well-established on-policy method can be more decisive than the nominal sample efficiency of an off-policy algorithm.

cs.RO↗