Onboard Lightweight LLM Reasoning for Human-Aware Safe UAV Navigation
The authors developed a modular system to improve UAV safety by moving beyond simple geometric obstacle avoidance. This system uses a shared AI encoder for perception and a lightweight Large Language Model (LLM) to infer context-dependent risks for different objects like pedestrians. By caching LLM verdicts and maintaining persistent object identities, the pipeline significantly reduces collisions in urban navigation while remaining feasible on onboard hardware.