Machine Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Navigation: An Overview

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a valuable source of data for a wide range of real-time applications, due to their functionality, availability, adaptability, and maneuverability. Working as mobile sensors, they can provide a cost-effective solution for extremely complex tasks, such as inspection, air-to-ground communications, search and rescue, surveillance, among others. Nevertheless, the robots needs to navigate in quite distinct environments and in different dynamism levels, usually facing unpredicted situations, very often using limited sensing and computing capabilities. A large number of solutions to this problem has been featured by the scientific community in the last years, some of them based on machine-learning (ML) methods. Due to its great capability to deal with big data and complexity, as well as its speedy and high-accuracy processing, the ML framework has been used to improve existing technologies and control techniques. In this context, its adoption in several UAV navigation strategies is expected to provide solutions for various problems where UAVs are used in real-time applications. Thus, in order to contextualize the most recent advances, this work provides a detailed survey of relevant researches in which ML techniques have been used in UAV navigation to improve some functional aspects, such as energy-efficiency, communication, execution time, resource management, obstacle avoidance, and path planning.