AWARE: Adaptive Whole-body Active Rotating Control for Enhanced LiDAR-Inertial Odometry under Human-in-the-Loop Interaction

TL;DR

AWARE is a bio-inspired adaptive yaw control framework that enhances LiDAR-inertial odometry for UAVs in complex environments by exploiting rotational agility and reinforcement learning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel whole-body active yawing method using differentiable MPC and RL to improve state estimation without additional hardware.

Findings

AWARE significantly reduces odometry drift in feature-sparse scenes.

The framework improves navigation accuracy and stability in diverse environments.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of adaptive yaw control in real-world UAV operations.

Abstract

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) UAV operation is essential in complex and safety-critical aerial surveying environments, where human operators provide navigation intent while onboard autonomy must maintain accurate and robust state estimation. A key challenge in this setting is that resource-constrained UAV platforms are often limited to narrow-field-of-view LiDAR sensors. In geometrically degenerate or feature-sparse scenes, limited sensing coverage often weakens LiDAR Inertial Odometry (LIO)'s observability, causing drift accumulation, degraded geometric accuracy, and unstable state estimation, which directly compromise safe and effective HITL operation and the reliability of downstream surveying products. To overcome this limitation, we present AWARE, a bio-inspired whole-body active yawing framework that exploits the UAV's own rotational agility to extend the effective sensor horizon and improve LIO's observability without additional mechanical actuation. The core of AWARE is a differentiable Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework embedded in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) loop. It first identifies the viewing direction that maximizes information gain across the full yaw space, and a lightweight RL agent then adjusts the MPC cost weights online according to the current environmental context, enabling an adaptive balance between estimation accuracy and flight stability. A Safe Flight Corridor mechanism further ensures operational safety within this HITL paradigm by decoupling the operator's navigational intent from autonomous yaw optimization to enable safe and efficient cooperative control. We validate AWARE through extensive experiments in diverse simulated and real-world environments.