FlightDiffusion: Revolutionising Autonomous Drone Training with Diffusion Models Generating FPV Video

Serpiva, Valerii, Lykov, Artem, Batool, Faryal, Kozlovskiy, Vladislav, Cabrera, Miguel Altamirano, Tsetserukou, Dzmitry

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Our model generates realistic video sequences from a single frame, enriched with corresponding action spaces to enable reasoning-driven navigation in dynamic environments. Beyond direct policy learning, FlightDiffusion leverages its generative capabilities to synthesize diverse FPV trajectories and state-action pairs, facilitating the creation of large-scale training datasets without the high cost of real-world data collection. Our evaluation demonstrates that the generated trajectories are physically plausible and executable, with a mean position error of 0.25 m (RMSE 0.28 m) and a mean orientation error of 0.19 rad (RMSE 0.24 rad). This approach enables improved policy learning and dataset scalability, leading to superior performance in downstream navigation tasks. Results in simulated environments highlight enhanced robustness, smoother trajectory planning, and adaptability to unseen conditions. An ANOV A revealed no statistically significant difference between performance in simulation and reality (F(1, 16) = 0.394, p = 0.541), with success rates of M = 0.628 (SD = 0.162) and M = 0.617 (SD = 0.177), respectively, indicating strong sim-to-real transfer . The generated datasets provide a valuable resource for future UA V research. This work introduces diffusion-based reasoning as a promising paradigm for unifying navigation, action generation, and data synthesis in aerial robotics.