Mechanical Engineering
Graduate Seminar
NOTICE OF SEMINAR PRESENTATION
CANDIDATE: Jingwen Zhang
DEGREE SOUGHT: MASc
DATE: 3/27/2026
TIME: 10:30am
PLACE: Room 1102 CEI
TITLE: Semantic Safety-Aware Unmanned Aerial Vehicle based on Vision-Language Model
Abstract
Safe UAV navigation in visually ambiguous coastal environments remains challenging due to reflections and low-texture regions. In this work, I propose an asynchronous dual-stream framework that combines a high-frequency reactive controller with a low-frequency semantic safety module based on a vision-language model. The semantic module evaluates scene-level risk using image-text similarity and constrains the control policy through a continuous risk signal. The approach is studied in the Microsoft AirSim coastline environment, and key limitations and planned research directions are discussed.