Skytopia: Monocular Drone Navigation with Action-Conditioned Latent World Models

Abstract

Monocular drone navigation requires reaching a goal in an unseen environment from a single forward-facing camera, which offers few cues for depth and scale. World models address this by modelling how observations evolve under actions, but they are built to be executed: the prediction is produced at deployment and fed back into action generation at every control step. We argue that what a policy needs from a world model is not the prediction but the representation required to produce it: in flight the executed action explains almost all of the change between observations, so prediction reduces to reprojecting a static scene under a known displacement. We therefore introduce skytopia, a policy built on an action-conditioned latent world model, and the 3D Gaussian Splatting platform on which it is trained. A forward objective predicts the representation of the next observation from the intended motion, and an inverse objective recovers that motion from the predicted transition. Because the prediction never reaches action generation, the predictor is discarded and one policy serves point-goal, image-goal, and goal-free navigation. Simulation experiments show that skytopia outperforms every baseline under all three specifications, attaining 57.8%, 66.0%, and 49.0% success rate, while discarding the predictor removes 59.4% of the inference cost. The same policy is subsequently deployed on a physical drone without fine-tuning and reaches goals in indoor, open outdoor, and woodland environments.