Methods and systems for autonomous generation of shortest lateral paths for unmanned aerial systems are described. An example system includes memory storing code and at least one processor to execute the code to cause the at least one processor to access an initial scenario including a source point, a target point, and a no flight zone, determine a computation time for identifying a lateral path for an aircraft to traverse that avoids the no flight zone, determine whether the determined computation time satisfies a threshold of a reference computation time, change the first number of vertices to a second number of vertices when the reference computation time is not satisfied, determine a buffer area surrounding the no flight zone, construct a visibility graph including lateral paths, and identify one of the lateral paths as being shorter than others of the lateral paths.