Terrain-Aware Low-Altitude Path Planning
Yixuan Jia, Andrea Tagliabue, Annika Thomas, Navid Dadkhah Tehrani, Jonathan P. How · 2026
In this paper, we study the problem of generating low-altitude path plans for nap-of-the-earth (NOE) flight in real time with only RGB images from onboard cameras and the vehicle pose. We propose a novel training method that combines behavior cloning and self-supervised learning, where the self-supervision component allows the learned policy to refine the paths generated by the expert planner. Simulation studies show 24.7% reduction in average path elevation compared to the standard behavior cloning approach.