An insight on UAV/drone autonomous navigation methods and applications: a review

Abstract

In the past decade, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining a lot amount of importance in the field of research and development. These UAVs have applications ranging from surveillance, the cinematography in movies, communication, transportation, agriculture, delivery of goods, and rescue operations in various scenarios. The navigation in drones is always a significant challenge as it depends on multiple aspects of technologies, which include both hardware and software. This survey paper lists the importance of UAVs and their various applications. The paper encompasses both the indoor and outdoor aspects of navigation. It describes various properties for navigating, like drone control architecture, deployed hardware-technologies, implemented algorithmic models, drone trajectory planning, and drone communications technologies requirements. Additionally, we also focus on the role of artificial intelligence paradigms for autonomous drone navigation. Vision-based navigation of UAVs using locality sensors and cameras has also discussed with the safety aspects of a drone's successful operation. This paper presents a review of the essential aspects of drone navigation methods and their applications. In the end, this survey reports the essential requirements of UAVs in civil applications from a navigation point of view.