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This paper introduces Arm2Air, a method that utilizes cross-embodiment transfer to adapt obstacle-avoidance skeletons from robot arms for optimal UAV relay placement in complex urban environments. By leveraging a pretrained Neural MP model and transformer-based transfer techniques, Arm2Air significantly enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of UAV relay networks, achieving a 64.9% reduction in planning runtime and substantial improvements in bottleneck capacity and variance. The results highlight the method's ability to achieve high performance with minimal target data, suggesting a novel approach for transferring structural knowledge across different robotic domains.
Arm2Air achieves a staggering 64.9% reduction in planning runtime for UAV relay placement in cluttered urban environments, showcasing the power of cross-embodiment knowledge transfer.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay networks can restore connectivity after communication infrastructure is damaged. Urban relay placement is difficult because line-of-sight blockage, communication range, altitude, and three-dimensional obstacles must be considered jointly. Arm2Air transfers obstacle-avoidance skeletons from robot arms to UAV relay placement through cross-embodiment transfer. Source-domain robot-arm motions from a pretrained Neural MP model are converted into ordered skeletons that pretrain a transformer-based transfer platform, which is then adapted to the UAV domain using limited target data and Low-Rank Adaptation. The transferred skeleton initializes a relay chain that is refined for connectivity, bottleneck capacity, delay, and movement cost. On nine held-out high-clutter 3D urban maps, Arm2Air reduced median end-to-end planning runtime by 64.9 percent relative to the fastest conventional planner. On the high-obstruction group of a separate 30-map dense urban holdout, it increased bottleneck capacity by 32.6 percent, reduced capacity variance by 74.7 percent, reduced maximum hop distance by 13.2 percent, reduced hop-distance variance by 75.2 percent, and reduced relay displacement by 16.9 percent relative to IMPC-MD. With only three target-domain training maps, Arm2Air reduced relay-position root mean square error by 53.6 percent relative to training from scratch while updating 0.134 million parameters, compared with 1.383 million for Scratch and Full Fine-tuning. These results demonstrate computationally and data-efficient UAV relay placement and suggest a broader principle for transferring ordered structural priors across heterogeneous embodied tasks.
