Simple and Efficient Algorithm for Drone Path Planning

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have gained a lot of popularity due to their large number of applications in surveillance, aerial photography, 3D mapping, search and rescue operations, and shipping and delivery of goods. A critical task in the deployment of drones is the computation of effective flying paths that allow drones to reach their destinations while avoiding obstacles and minimizing the amount of energy that they need to consume. We present a novel path planning algorithm that is not only faster and uses less memory than other existing path planning algorithms, but it also produces shorter paths. All these performance metric improvements lead to a more energy efficient path planning algorithm for autonomous drones.