Path planning in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Overview, Challenges, and Solutions

Abstract

Path planning is a significant problem while designing UAV systems. Though a massive amount of research suggests solutions for the issues and challenges of UAV path planning, the issues and challenges still exist. On the one hand, UAV path optimization problems involve infinite variables due to the continuous UAV trajectory to be determined. On the other hand, the issues are often impacted by various real-world restrictions (such as connection, fuel limits, collision avoidance, and terrain avoidance), which are challenging to simulate since they change over time. Besides, path planning selects the shortest optimal path and avoids obstacles and collisions during the flight. This manuscript investigates the state-of-the-art history, classification, and applications of UAVs, then the main challenges in UAV design are overviewed. One of the main challenges in UAVs is path planning with obstacle avoidance. In addition, the paper provides a comparison and summarization of the leading methodologies and strategies for path planning.