Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following

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.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.10166 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.10166v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10166 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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