A New Hybrid Water Cycle Algorithm for Path Planning with Obstacle Avoidance for Indoor Assistant Autonomous UAV Navigation

Assisting elderly individuals in indoor environments is crucial, as they often encounter mobility and safety challenges. Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) navigation offers a transformative solution, significantly enhancing safety, efficiency, and quality of life. These UAVs can perform tasks such as monitoring, delivering essential items, and responding to emergencies, providing invaluable support and promoting greater independence for elderly individuals. To achieve effective assistance, autonomous UAV navigation relies on robust path planning with obstacle avoidance to ensure optimal performance. A newly developed path planning, based on a new hybrid Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA), stands out by addressing the challenge of avoiding obstacles while adhering to non-holonomic constraints and conserving energy in complex, cluttered indoor environments. In Population-Based Algorithms (PBAs), the initial population plays a crucial role, as it greatly impacts the algorithm’s efficiency in exploring the search space and its rate of convergence. The new developed hybrid algorithm, called WCA-HS, is based on using the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm to identify the optimal initial population for the WCA. The results indicate that the hybrid WCA-HS outperforms classical WCA and other metaheuristic algorithms, such as HS, Firefly Algorithm (FA), Cuckoo Search (CS), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Differential Evolution (DE), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), over 20 independent runs, highlighting the effectiveness of the population initialization technique. Additionally, the developed indoor path planning system was evaluated in highly cluttered and low-light environments, showcasing its robustness and real-world applicability, making it highly effective for assisting elderly individuals in complex indoor environments.