Recent Developments in Path Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in performing diverse missions at significantly lower costs compared to the human beings. UAVs have the capabilities to reach and execute mission in those areas that are very difficult for humans to even reach such as forest, deserts, and mines. Integration of the latest technologies including reactive controls, sense and avoid, and onboard computations have strengthened their dominance further in various practical missions. Besides the innovative applications, the use of UAVs imposes several challenges, and one of those challenges is computing a low-cost path for aerial mission by avoiding obstacles as well as satisfying certain performance objectives (a.k.a path planning (PP)). To this end, this chapter provides a concise overview of various aspects concerning to PP including basics introduction of the subject matter, categorization of the PP approaches and problems, taxonomy of the essential components of the PP, performance objectives of the PP approaches, recent algorithms that have been proposed for PP in known and unknown environments, and future prospects of research in this area considering the emerging technologies. With this chapter, we aim to provide sufficient knowledge about one of the essential components of robotics technology (i.e., navigation) for researchers.