Aero-VPA: Few-Step Flow-Matching Control over Non-Reconstructive JEPA Latents for Agile Flight on Edge Hardware

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize across tasks, but their autoregressive decoders need sequential forward passes in proportion to the action horizon, each bounded below on embedded aerial platforms by streaming billions of parameters from memory. We present Aero-VPA, a lightweight Vision-Predictor-Action architecture for 3D navigation on edge hardware. A compact RGB-D Vision Transformer and a five-head ensemble predictor, trained without pixel reconstruction, forecast the next latent state; a Conditional Flow Matching solver generates a velocity and yaw-rate chunk in two Euler steps, so each decision takes five sequential network evaluations; and the ensemble dispersion drives an uncertainty fallback. Version 1 specified the architecture, deployment and protocol without results. This version reports the first closed-loop evaluation: PX4 software-in-the-loop simulation of quadrotor missions in procedurally generated forests. Behaviour cloning failed on all 60 missions despite open-loop errors of 0.02-0.04 m/s: the policy copies its last command, a copycat form of causal confusion. DAgger with a privileged, safety-gated supervisor gave the first successes but plateaued at 11.1-21.1% across six checkpoints. A map-free runtime shield with a 15 s depth memory, barrier constraints, a cap on motion outside the 73-degree field of view and backoff along the flown path raised the first DAgger policy's success on 180 paired missions from 21.1% to 52.2% (95% CI [45.0, 59.4]; exact McNemar p = 1.2 x 10^-10) and cut its crashes from 72.2% to 22.2%, while timeouts rose from 2.8% to 23.3%. All six checkpoints gained 30.0-34.4 percentage points, at mean speeds of 1.16-1.36 m/s. The code (https://github.com/ylee-sling/Aero-VPA), the trained policy (72.6 MB, https://huggingface.co/ylee-sling/aero-vpa) and the full benchmark dataset are public.