Executive brief
RACER is a multi-UAV autonomous exploration system used for collaborative mapping and surveillance missions. A flaw in its exploration control logic can cause a UAV to become stuck in an infinite retry loop when attempting to reach an unreachable target, preventing the vehicle from making progress and potentially compromising the efficiency of multi-UAV teams. This results in mission failure or extended downtime until the operation times out.
Technical details
The vulnerability is an unbounded retry loop in the finite state machine (FSM) exploration component. When trajectory planning to a viewpoint fails (A* pathfinding returns FAIL), the FSM sets a static flag but does not limit retries, invalidate the unreachable target, or select an alternative frontier. Subsequent replanning operations triggered by collision avoidance or return behaviors continue attempting the same unreachable next_pos_ without forcing a new exploration-planning decision. The root cause is the absence of retry counters, target invalidation logic, and fallback-state transitions in the failure branch of the PLAN_TRAJ state. An affected UAV will repeatedly execute unsuccessful pathfinding and trajectory-planning operations, generating logs but making no exploration progress, effectively denying service to the mission. No patch status is mentioned in the advisory.
Affected products
- Robotics-STAR-Lab (SYSU STAR Group) RACER commit abcdef1234567890
Timeline
- 2026-09-10: disclosed