UAVs follow targets safely using future-aware path planning
Future-Aware Flow Planning for Safe UAV Target Following
Robotics
Summary
Following a moving target with drones is tricky because obstacles and sudden turns can cause crashes or lost tracking. The authors created a system that predicts where the target will go next and plans safe drone paths ahead of time. Their method checks and fixes risky parts of the route during planning, improving safety and tracking accuracy in tests. This approach works well in complex simulated environments and balances following closely with avoiding collisions.
What this means in practice
- •For drone operators: Plan safer drone paths for following moving targets around obstacles using future predictions and risk-aware adjustments.
- •For autonomous vehicle developers: Improve path planning for autonomous vehicles tracking moving targets by integrating predicted futures and embedded safety corrections.
Tested on simulated data.
Authors
Boning Feng, Haoran Zhang, Xiaowen Bi, Yanzhen Zhang, Xiaodan Shi
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.