A Brief Overview of Autonomous Path Planning Algorithms for UAV Applications; reflections from a survey

Abstract

The past two decades of research on UAVs has revealed that about seventy percent of it had been published in the previous four years. To serve the exponentially increasing role of UAVs in multi-disciplinary research, the choice for most suitable path planning algorithms is presented in this work. The extent of autonomy in path planning for a UAV primarily depends upon the capabilities of its algorithm. Hence, a comprehensive survey study was proposed and conducted. This article presents a summary of the survey and suggests most suitable path planning algorithms for a UAV application. A collective consciousness was also developed while going through the process and presented on how the research work on intelligent robots should be categorized to cater future needs.