Drone Autonomous Perception-Aware Path Planning for Survey and Inspection Missions
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2026 | Viewed by 19
Special Issue Editors
Interests: path planning; navigation; autonomous missions; artificial intelligence; control engineering; mechatronics and robotics
Interests: co-operative control; robotics; adaptive signal processing; time-varying systems; machine learning
Interests: artificial intelligence; machine learning; data mining and knowledge discovery
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The integration of advanced sensing technologies into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has transformed drones into powerful platforms for a wide range of applications across agriculture, construction, mining, and environmental monitoring. In survey and inspection operations, drones are increasingly relied upon for tasks such as crop and livestock monitoring, crop spraying, soil and field analysis, infrastructure inspections (e.g., power lines, pipelines, bridges), stockpile measurements, and environmental assessments, including forest monitoring and disaster response. Traditionally, these missions have been heavily dependent on human teleoperation, requiring skilled pilots to ensure the quality and relevance of the data collected. However, the full potential of onboard sensing technologies for enabling autonomy in such missions remains underexplored. The move toward perception-aware autonomy represents a significant leap forward in enhancing efficiency, safety, and scalability of drone operations.
This Special Issue is focused on the advances of research for automation of path planning for enabling drones to carry on survey and inspection missions in semi-autonomous and fully autonomous manners aided with onboard perception sensors. Specifically, considering the mission objectives into the planning phase, flight path design, trajectory optimization, and drone control for satisfying the survey and inspection mission. Thus, we encourage submissions, but not limited to, topics such as:
- Perception-aware mission planning considering the mission objectives.
- Search-based and sampling-based algorithms and supervised and unsupervised learning techniques for perception-aware path planning.
- AI-based perception-aware path planning for static missions for applications such as crop monitoring, bridge inspection, and surveying waterways.
- AI-based perception-aware path planning for dynamic missions for applications such as sheep herding, survey of forest fire, and flood assessment.
- Task decomposition and allocation between the drone and human pilot for semi and full autonomous missions.
- AI-based guidance of human pilots for overcoming challenging and complex scenarios.
- Perception-aware path planning for obstacle avoidance during the survey and inspection mission.
The Special Issue welcomes all contributions ranging from original research articles to comprehensive reviews that explore the multifaceted applications of drone autonomous path planning for survey and inspection missions.
This special issue targets advances in research on drone autonomous path and mission planning with applications in different industries such as agriculture, construction, and mining. This is fully aligned with the Sensors Journal aims and scopes.
Dr. Samer Hanoun
Dr. Sui Yang Khoo
Prof. Dr. Chee Peng Lim
Prof. Dr. Khaled Eskaf
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- multi-rotor drones
- fixed-wing drones
- autonomous navigation
- path planning
- mission planning
- task decomposition
- survey and inspection missions
- human pilot guidance
- perception-aware path planning
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