  This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path
planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial
robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic
contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and
exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a
priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized
and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of
completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path
planners support both holonomic and nonholonomic systems, and respect the
on-board sensor model and constraints. An overview of the achieved results,
followed by an integrating architecture in order to enable fully autonomous and
highly-efficient infrastructure inspection in both known and unknown
environments.
