| Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) navigation is a necessary task within a UAV mission, performed by human operators. Developing an autonomous UAV navigation system would reduce this human dependency, hence allowing humans to dedicate their attention only to the interesting services provided by UAVs. This work fulfills this need by developing a Real-Time Autonomous Path Planning system for UAVs.; This work has shown that one of the best path planning solutions is to make use of Genetic Algorithms (GA). Their only disadvantage is their high computational demands; hence, it may be difficult to realise a Real-Time implementation. To eliminate this weakness, this research implements the GA on an FPGA. The FPGA provides a parallel processing capability that considerably accelerates the speed of executing the GA (up to 10,000 times faster). This research's results will make possible the integration of a Real-Time Path Planner in the next generation of UAVs.; Keywords: UAV, Path Planning, Genetic Algorithm, FPGA, Real-Time... |
