CosFly: Plan in the Matrix, Fly in the World
CosFly is a box-structured planning and multimodal simulation pipeline for aerial tracking, along with the CosFly-Track dataset for UAV dynamic target tracking in diverse environments. Implemented on CARLA, it converts 3D worlds into structured obstacles for planning and renders multimodal sensor data with configurable fixed-FOV zoom. The pipeline analyzes two trajectory planning paradigms and the dataset includes 250 trajectories and ~100,000 images with full 6-DOF annotations.
[2605.19120] CosFly: Plan in the Matrix, Fly in the World
[Submitted on 18 May 2026]
Title:CosFly: Plan in the Matrix, Fly in the World
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Abstract:We present CosFly, a box-structured planning and multimodal simulation pipeline for aerial tracking, together with CosFly-Track, a large-scale UAV dataset for dynamic target tracking across diverse environments including urban centers, highways, rural landscapes, forests, and coastal towns. In our current implementation on CARLA, CosFly provides a modular 7-step construction pipeline that converts complex 3D worlds into structured obstacle representations for planning, then projects the resulting trajectories back into multi-modal sensor data -- including RGB images, high-precision depth maps, and semantic segmentation masks -- paired with natural language navigation instructions. A key feature is the support for configurable fixed-FOV zoom levels (one FOV setting drawn per trajectory and held constant throughout), enabling simulation of various focal lengths through camera-intrinsic adjustments. The pipeline covers the complete workflow from 3D map export through grid simplification, pedestrian and drone trajectory planning, multi-modal rendering with 6-DOF pose annotations, quality inspection, and teacher-student caption generation. We analyze two trajectory-planning paradigms for aerial target tracking: a conventional two-stage pipeline with front-end candidate generation and backend refinement, and a direct gradient-based formulation that optimizes multiple tracking constraints in a single objective. The public CosFly-Track release contains 250 validated trajectories and approximately 100,000 rendered images with complete 6-DOF drone pose annotations (position x, y, z and orientation yaw, pitch, roll). Together, the pipeline and dataset establish a scalable foundation for aerial-ground collaborative research, supporting dynamic target tracking, UAV navigation, and multi-modal perception across diverse environments.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.19120 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2605.19120v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19120
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Hanxuan Chen [view email] [v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 21:11:18 UTC (29,714 KB)
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