Fly360: Omnidirectional Obstacle Avoidance within Drone View
2026-03-06 • Robotics
RoboticsArtificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors focused on making drones better at avoiding obstacles coming from any direction, not just from where the drone is facing. They created Fly360, a system that uses panoramic cameras to see all around the drone and turns these images into depth maps for safer navigation. Their approach includes training methods and a decision-making model that guides the drone's movements in complex environments. Tests in simulations and real life showed Fly360 works better than older systems that only look forward.
UAVobstacle avoidanceomnidirectional perceptionpanoramic cameradepth mappolicy networkrandom-yaw trainingbody-frame velocitycollision-free motionspatial awareness
Authors
Xiangkai Zhang, Dizhe Zhang, WenZhuo Cao, Zhaoliang Wan, Yingjie Niu, Lu Qi, Xu Yang, Zhiyong Liu
Abstract
Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/