“…If the main operations executed by the IPA are investigated, it can be easily seen that the IPA differs from the most representative meta-heuristics including ACO, ABC, PSO, BA, FA, FWA, DE, and GA [53]. While the exploitation-dominant operations of the IPA are designed in a semi-adaptive manner and adjust the convergence dynamically without changing the initial values of the control parameters, a quasi-deterministic approach is responsible for managing the important part of exploration, and its promising performance has been validated recently for engineering problems such as channel assignment [54], time series prediction [55], wireless sensor deployment [56], signal noise minimization [57], neural network training [58], and also UAV or UCAV path planning [59]. In this study, the plasma transfer scheme of the IP algorithm was changed with a newly introduced approach called extended treatment, and an extended IP algorithm, or ExtIPA, was designed to solve the path-planning problem.…”