Abstract
Vision Language Action (VLA) models unify visual perception, natural-language understanding, and action generation within a single foundation model, allowing a robot to follow instructions such as "fold the towel" or "fly to the red building" directly from camera images. Because VLAs inherit world knowledge from internet-scale pre-training, they have become the dominant framework for learning-based manipulation, with bimanual coordination serving as the most demanding testbed: two arms with 7 degrees of freedom each must move in concert to fold, assemble, and reorient objects.
Unmanned aerial robotics faces a structurally similar challenge: a drone must coordinate thrust, attitude, and increasingly gripper commands from visual observations under strict latency and payload constraints. This review covers 183 contributions spanning 2017-2026 and organized along seven dimensions: VLA architectures, training recipes, action representations, bimanual coordination (2022-2026), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation and control (2017-2026), language grounding, and cross-cutting concerns including memory and world models.
We show that the coordination strategies, training recipes, and action representations developed for bimanual VLAs transfer to unmanned aerial systems and identify fourteen research directions across both domains.
Blogger's Review: This review delves into the application of VLA models in complex operations, particularly the coordination between bimanual manipulation and UAVs, showcasing the immense potential and challenges of future robotic technologies. Understanding the cross-domain applicability of these models is crucial for researchers and developers alike.