QuadAgent: A Responsive Agent System for Vision-Language Guided Quadrotor Agile Flight

2026-04-03

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of enabling high-speed, safe navigation for quadrotor drones in complex environments using vision-language instructions. It proposes a training-free, asynchronous multi-agent architecture that decouples high-level semantic understanding from low-level flight control: a foreground agent interprets user instructions, while a background agent performs lookahead reasoning, supported by a lightweight “impression map” that retains critical scene information. This approach achieves, for the first time, integrated high-speed obstacle avoidance and task execution under visual-language guidance without any training. Experimental results demonstrate that the system outperforms existing baselines in simulation and successfully executes complex language commands at speeds up to 5 m/s while navigating safely through cluttered real-world indoor environments.

Abstract

We present QuadAgent, a training-free agent system for agile quadrotor flight guided by vision-language inputs. Unlike prior end-to-end or serial agent approaches, QuadAgent decouples high-level reasoning from low-level control using an asynchronous multi-agent architecture: Foreground Workflow Agents handle active tasks and user commands, while Background Agents perform look-ahead reasoning. The system maintains scene memory via the Impression Graph, a lightweight topological map built from sparse keyframes, and ensures safe flight with a vision-based obstacle avoidance network. Simulation results show that QuadAgent outperforms baseline methods in efficiency and responsiveness. Real-world experiments demonstrate that it can interpret complex instructions, reason about its surroundings, and navigate cluttered indoor spaces at speeds up to 5 m/s.

Problem

• quadrotor
• vision-language guidance
• agile flight
• autonomous navigation
• obstacle avoidance

Innovation

• asynchronous multi-agent architecture
• vision-language navigation
• impression graph
• training-free agent system
• quadrotor agile flight