VoLN: Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation---Paradigm, Benchmark, and Method

Researchers introduced VoLN, a vision-only long-horizon navigation framework for aerial robotics in GPS-denied settings.

They released VoLN-UAV, a benchmark with 7,210 episodes spanning multiple difficulty levels for evaluating UAV navigation from local visual cues alone.

A baseline, VoLN-MLLM, achieved only modest success on the unseen split, underscoring how hard long-range visual reasoning and closed-loop control remain.

The work cleanly separates pure visual navigation from instruction-based route hints and provides an initial testbed for open-environment planning and action.