  With technological advancement, drone has emerged as unmanned aerial vehicle
that can be controlled by humans to fly or reach a destination. This may be
autonomous as well, where the drone itself is intelligent enough to find a
shortest obstacle-free path to reach the destination from a designated source.
Be it a planned smart city or even a wreckage site affected by natural
calamity, we may imagine the buildings, any surface-erected structure or other
blockage as obstacles for the drone to fly in a straight line-of-sight path. To
address such path-planning of drones, the bird's eye-view of the whole
landscape is first transformed to a graph of grid-cells, where some are
occupied to indicate the obstacles and some are free to indicate the free path.
We propose a method to find out the shortest obstacle-free path in the
coordinate system guided by GPS. The autonomous drone (AutoDrone) will thus be
able to move from one place to another along the shortest path, without
colliding into hindrances, while traveling in a two-dimensional space.
Heuristics to extend this to long journeys and 3D space are also elaborated.
Our approach can be especially beneficial in rescue operations and fast
delivery or pick-up in an energy-efficient way, where our algorithm will help
in finding out the shortest path and angle along which it should fly.
Experiments are done on different scenarios of map layouts and obstacle
positions to understand the shortest feasible route, computed by the autonomous
drone.
