Benchmarking Interaction-Oriented Aerial Mobility across Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract:Aerial mobile manipulation requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to traverse heterogeneous environments such as indoor and outdoor domains, and connect navigation with subsequent physical interaction within the same trajectories. Existing aerial benchmarks are typically confined to single-environment settings, limiting evaluation of agents across continuous environmental transitions. When interaction is evaluated, agents are often initialized near the target, leaving the transition from navigation to interaction largely unassessed. This work introduces CrossFly, a benchmark for long-horizon interaction-oriented aerial mobility across heterogeneous environments. CrossFly contains 15K trajectories across more than 20 reconstructed scenes under a unified simulation and evaluation framework, covering Indoor, Outdoor, and Indoor$\leftrightarrow$Outdoor trajectories. It further introduces Interaction Readiness Rate (IRR) to assess whether terminal navigation states provide suitable conditions for downstream interaction without assuming a specific manipulation policy. Experiments with five representative aerial vision-language-action (VLA) agents and the proposed CrossFly-Agent show that Indoor$\leftrightarrow$Outdoor settings are more challenging than single-environment settings, with the highest success rate reaching 9.7% on unseen scenes. A downstream manipulation case study further validates the relevance of interaction-oriented arrival to subsequent physical interaction. We hope CrossFly helps advance aerial embodied intelligence toward unified mobility and physical interaction in heterogeneous environments.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.18381 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.18381v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.18381 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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