A Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Policy with Progress-Aware Hybrid Execution for UAV Waypoint Navigation in...

Offline action prediction does not by itself guarantee reliable closed-loop flight for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) vision-language-action (VLA) models. We study a controlled AirSim Blocks waypoint task using 100 expert episodes and 3385 RGB-D, instruction, state, and action records. Checkpoints are selected only on val-seen data, after which val-unseen is evaluated once. A 132,840-parameter policy reaches 0.9278±0.0019 final-test action accuracy across three training seeds, yet raw VLA control fails in closed loop. We therefore embed its action proposals in progress-aware hybrid execution with explicit recovery and near-goal precision. The strongest checkpoint reaches 59/60 goals, but crossing three independently trained checkpoints with three target seeds yields a more conservative 147/180 successes (81.7%) with zero recorded collisions and marked checkpoint sensitivity. Substantial overrides and fallback-tagged steps further show that the reported closed-loop outcomes are properties of the hybrid system, not of the learned policy alone. These findings are restricted to the controlled AirSim Blocks benchmark and do not demonstrate real-UAV deployment, sim-to-real transfer, or field robustness.