A Comprehensive Overview of Classical and Modern Route Planning Algorithms for Self-Driving Mobile Robots

Mobile robots are increasingly being applied in a variety of sectors, including agricultural, firefighting, and search and rescue operations. Robotics and autonomous technology research and development have played a major role in making this possible. Before a robot can reliably and effectively navigate a space without human aid, there are still several challenges to be addressed. When planning a path to its destination, the robot should be able to gather information from its surroundings and take the appropriate actions to avoid colliding with obstacles along the way. The following review analyses and compares 200 articles from two databases, Scopus and IEEE Xplore, and selects 60 articles as references from those articles. This evaluation focuses mostly on the accuracy of the different path-planning algorithms. Common collision-free path planning methodologies are examined in this paper, including classical or traditional and modern intelligence techniques, as well as both global and local approaches, in static and dynamic environments. Classical or traditional methods, such as Roadmaps (Visibility Graph and Voronoi Diagram), Potential Fields, and Cell Decomposition, and modern methodologies such as heuristic-based (Dijkstra Method, A* Algorithms, and D* Algorithms), metaheuristics algorithms (such as PSO, Bat Algorithm, ACO, and Genetic Algorithm), and neural systems such as fuzzy neural networks or fuzzy logic (FL) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are described in this report. In this study, we outline the ideas, benefits, and downsides of modeling and path-searching technologies for a mobile robot

An Energy Efficient Data Collection Using Multiple UAVs in Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey Study

   اليوم، مع التقدم العلمي والتكنولوجي في الروبوتات، والذكاء الاصطناعي، والسيطرة والحواسيب، المركبات البرية والجوية والبحرية قد تم الاهتمام بها. كما تم تحسين الطائرات بدون طيار (UAVs) بشكل كبير وهي مفيدة جدا للعديد من التطبيقات الهامة في الأعمال التجارية والبيئة الحضرية والعسكرية. أحد أهم استخدامات الطائرات بدون طيار في شبكات الاستشعار اللاسلكية (WSNs)  التي لديها طاقة منخفضة وقد لا تكون قادرة على الاتصال في مناطق واسعة. في هذه الحالة ، يمكن أن توفر الطائرة بدون طيار وسيلة لجمع بيانات WSN من جهاز واحد ونقلها إلى المستلم المقصود تركز هذه المقالة على مجال البحث في التطبيقات العملية للطائرات بدون طيار كجامع متنقل لشبكات الاستشعار اللاسلكية. أولا التحقيقات حول الطائرات بدون طيار المقترحة تم دراستها ومقارنة نقاط ضعفها مع بعضها البعض. وكذلك التحديات التقنية لتطبيقات الطائرات بدون طيار في شبكة الاستشعار اللاسلكية تم استكشافها.Today, with scientific and technological advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, control and computers, land, air, and sea vehicles, they have been considered. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have also significantly improved and are very useful for many important applications in the business, urban and military environment. One of the important uses of UAVs in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is that devices with low energy and may not be able to communicate in large areas. Nevertheless, a UAV can provide a tool for collecting the data of WSN from one device and transmitting it to another device. This article focuses on the field of research on practical applications of UAVs as mobile collectors for wireless sensor networks. First, the investigations of the proposed UAV were studied and compared their weaknesses with each other. Then, the technical challenges of the applications of UAVs in the wireless sensor network were explored

Optimizing UAV Navigation: A Particle Swarm Optimization Approach for Path Planning in 3D Environments

This study explores the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planning within a simulated three-dimensional environment. UAVs, increasingly prevalent across various sectors, demand efficient navigation solutions that account for dynamic and unpredictable elements. Traditional pathfinding algorithms often fall short in complex scenarios, hence the shift towards PSO, a bio-inspired algorithm recognized for its adaptability and robustness. We developed a Python-based framework to simulate the UAV path planning scenario. The PSO algorithm was tasked to navigate a UAV from a starting point to a predetermined destination while avoiding spherical obstacles. The environment was set within a 3D grid with a series of waypoints, marking the UAV's trajectory, generated by the PSO to ensure obstacle avoidance and path optimization. The PSO parameters were meticulously tuned to balance the exploration and exploitation of the search space, with an emphasis on computational efficiency. A cost function penalizing proximity to obstacles guided the PSO in real-time decision-making, resulting in a collision-free and optimized path. The UAV's trajectory was visualized in both 2D and 3D perspectives, with the analysis focusing on the path's smoothness, length, and adherence to spatial constraints. The results affirm the PSO's effectiveness in UAV path planning, successfully avoiding obstacles and minimizing path length. The findings highlight PSO's potential for practical UAV applications, emphasizing the importance of parameter optimization. This research contributes to the advancement of autonomous UAV navigation, indicating PSO as a viable solution for real-world path planning challenges

Drone Base Station Trajectory Management for Optimal Scheduling in LTE-Based Sparse Delay-Sensitive M2M Networks

Providing connectivity in areas out of reach of the cellular infrastructure is a very active area of research. This connectivity is particularly needed in case of the deployment of machine type communication devices (MTCDs) for critical purposes such as homeland security. In such applications, MTCDs are deployed in areas that are hard to reach using regular communications infrastructure while the collected data is timely critical. Drone-supported communications constitute a new trend in complementing the reach of the terrestrial communication infrastructure. In this study, drones are used as base stations to provide real-time communication services to gather critical data out of a group of MTCDs that are sparsely deployed in a marine environment. Studying different communication technologies as LTE, WiFi, LPWAN and Free-Space Optical communication (FSOC) incorporated with the drone communications was important in the first phase of this research to identify the best candidate for addressing this need. We have determined the cellular technology, and particularly LTE, to be the most suitable candidate to support such applications. In this case, an LTE base station would be mounted on the drone which will help communicate with the different MTCDs to transmit their data to the network backhaul. We then formulate the problem model mathematically and devise the trajectory planning and scheduling algorithm that decides the drone path and the resulting scheduling. Based on this formulation, we decided to compare between an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based technique that optimizes the drone movement among the sparsely-deployed MTCDs and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based solution that achieves the same purpose. This optimization is based on minimizing the energy cost of the drone movement while ensuring the data transmission deadline missing is minimized. We present the results of several simulation experiments that validate the different performance aspects of the technique

An Overview of Evolutionary Algorithms toward Spacecraft Attitude Control

Evolutionary algorithms can be used to solve interesting problems for aeronautical and astronautical applications, and it is a must to review the fundamentals of the most common evolutionary algorithms being used for those applications. Genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, firefly algorithm, ant colony optimization, artificial bee colony optimization, and the cuckoo search algorithm are presented and discussed with an emphasis on astronautical applications. In summary, the genetic algorithm and its variants can be used for a large parameter space but is more efficient in global optimization using a smaller chromosome size such that the number of parameters being optimized simultaneously is less than 1000. It is found that PID controller parameters, nonlinear parameter identification, and trajectory optimization are applications ripe for the genetic algorithm. Ant colony optimization and artificial bee colony optimization are optimization routines more suited for combinatorics, such as with trajectory optimization, path planning, scheduling, and spacecraft load bearing. Particle swarm optimization, firefly algorithm, and cuckoo search algorithms are best suited for large parameter spaces due to the decrease in computation need and function calls when compared to the genetic algorithm family of optimizers. Key areas of investigation for these social evolution algorithms are in spacecraft trajectory planning and in parameter identification

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation