Blog
How to build and evaluate smarter autonomous drones — with the same rigor we use in our research benchmarks and public datasets.
Guide
GuideMay 2, 2026
How to Make Autonomous Drones Smarter (Without Wishful Thinking)
A practical stack for AI drone autonomy: simulation-first iteration, metric grounding, modular perception and planning, and closed-loop evaluation.
12 min readRead more
Research
ResearchMay 2, 2026
The Metric Gap in Vision-Language Drone Navigation: What Actually Breaks
Why general-purpose VLMs struggle as end-to-end drone controllers, what fails in closed loop, and why separating semantics from geometry is the pragmatic path.
14 min readRead more
Dataset
DatasetMay 2, 2026
Yonder: A Large-Scale Drone Navigation Dataset and Why Offline mAP Lies to You
What Yonder contains, who it is for, and how cross-simulator evaluation prevents false confidence when training perception for embodied flight.
11 min readRead more
More to read
Paper-style writeups and dataset details live on the research page; deep product docs live in the open astral-docs repository.