RAVEN: Resilient Aerial Navigation via Open-Set Semantic Memory and Behavior Adaptation

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026

Seungchan Kim · Omar Alama · Dmytro Kurdydyk · John Keller
Nikhil Keetha · Wenshan Wang · Yonatan Bisk · Sebastian Scherer

Paper | Project Page | Video

News/Release

• 01/31/2026: RAVEN was accepted to IEEE ICRA 2026!
• 10/25/2025: RAVEN was presented at IROS 2025 Active Perception Workshop, and received Oustanding Best Paper Award Finalist!
• 09/28/2025: arXiv paper is uploaded. Stay tuned for code release!

Understanding code pipeline structure

RayFronts serves as a perception and representation backbone of RAVEN.

AirStack serves as an aerial robot autonomy stack, which supports interface for Isaac Sim, and handles sensors, global & local planning, collision avoidance.

+-------------+  Interface    +-------------------+    Sensor Topics    +-------------------+
|  Isaac Sim  | ----------->  |     AirStack      | ------------------> |     RayFronts     |
| Simulation  |               |  Autonomy Stack   |                     | Perception & Map  |
+-------------+               |-------------------|                     |-------------------|
                              | - Sim interface   |                     | - 3D Mapping      |
                              | - Sensor drivers  |                     | - Representation  |
                              | - Global planner  | <-------------------| - Semantic logic  |
                              | - Local planner   |   Global Waypoints  | - Behavior Tree   |
                              | - Collision avoid |                     |                   |
                              +-------------------+                     +-------------------+ 

Environment Setup

First, for RayFronts setup, please follow the instructions in: RayFronts Setup

Next, for AirStack setup, please follow the instructions in:

Run RAVEN

In one terminal, start the RayFronts docker container

./run_docker.sh

Then,

./mapping_server_rosnode.sh

On another terminal, start the AirStack with IsaacSim

xhost +
airstack up