An enhanced African Vulture Optimization Algorithm for solving the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles path planning problem✩

In recent years, research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has become one of the most interesting topics for industry and academics. UAVs path planning is one of the most important issues in terms of guaranteeing good performance in real-world applications. Its main objective is to determine and ensure an optimal and collision-free trajectory (path) between two positions from a starting point (source) to a destination point (target), while dealing with some requirements (e.g. safety, environment complexity, obstacle avoidance, energy consumption, etc.). In view of this topic's complexity, an efficient path planning algorithm is required. In this paper, we propose an improvement of the meta-heuristic African Vulture Optimization Algorithm (AVOA), named Chaotic Cauchy Opposition-based AVOA (CCO-AVOA), for solving the UAVs path planning problem in a 3D environment. The effectiveness of the proposed CCO-AVOA is validated in different environments with various numbers of waypoints and threats taking into account the fitness value, path cost, height cost, obstacles cost, UAV's angle cost, and execution time metrics. Compared to ten well-known meta-heuristics, simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed CCO-AVOA approach in most cases by obtaining a short, smooth, least costly, and collision-free path with better stability for UAVs in complex environments.