Aspects of unmanned aerial vehicles path planning: Overview and applications

Aiming to the applications from security surveillance, military operational capabilities to the content and package delivery, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has a successfully created his space in the available technologies. The compact sized powerful flying robots are wirelessly controlled and are capable to complete tasks with and without direct human intervention. UAVs however still face serious challenges that limit the dream of complete autonomous unmanned flying machines. The key challenges include path planning and obstacle avoidance of these unmanned flying robots that are unavoidable while performing the application-specific functionalities both in indoor and outdoor environments. In this manuscript with a survey, we investigate the state-of-the-art UAV path planning algorithms and obstacle avoidance techniques. We have also summarized and compared the schemes in tabular form. In addition, current and future research directions and challenges are also discussed, showing the prospective research directions.