Path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles: Current state and future challenges

Abstract

Path planning is the preliminary requirement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for their autonomous functions. This paper discusses the significant usage of UAVs in distinct applications and the need for path planning in order to increase their service rate in different applications. UAV’s path planning can be either start to goal or coverage path planning. Path planning techniques can be generally categorized as roadmap/skeleton, approximate/exact cell decomposition, potential field, sampling-based, and bio-inspired/machine learning-based methods. These methods are briefly discussed in this paper. Finally, the present state of the art of UAV’s path planning using these techniques is discussed. This paper will be a seed source for the researchers who are actively working on UAVs to implement efficient path planning techniques according to their usability in different applications.