Exploration Priority Based Heuristic Approach to UAV path planning

Abstract

This paper presents a 3D online path planning algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with limited range sensors and computational resources in unknown cluttered environments. Even though quadrotor UAVs are considered to be a promising technology for surveillance purposes in indoor environments and for close observation in outdoor urban areas, it is very difficult to achieve autonomous aerial navigation toward a goal avoiding unpredicted collisions. Furthermore, greater attention and effort should be aimed at improving the computational efficiency and performance of path planning algorithms. The proposed heuristic algorithm offers on-the-fly path findings with a lesser computational complexity. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm in a real world scenario implemented using the V-REP simulator.