A Survey of Motion and Task Planning Techniques for Unmanned Multicopter Systems

Unmanned aerial systems provide many applications with the ability to perform flying tasks autonomously, and hence have received significant research and commercial attention in the past decade. One of the most popular unmanned aerial platforms for such tasks is the small-scale rotorcraft with multiple rotors, commonly known as multicopters. In order for these platforms to perform fully autonomous missions and tasks, they require a sophisticated low-level flight control system that is integrated with advanced task and motion planning modules, which combine together to form the complete unmanned aerial system (UAS). In this paper, the planning module of unmanned multicopter systems is discussed in detail, and a comprehensive survey on techniques for both motion and task planning reported in literature and by the Unmanned Systems Research Group at the National University of Singapore is presented.