Complete Coverage Path Planning for arbitrary number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Dimitris Dedousis, Vana Kalogeraki · 2016
In this paper we study the problem of complete path coverage planning for a set of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments. The geographical area we aim to cover is represented as a grid of cells with no holes and the center of every cell in this grid represents a node. Thus, the problem we solve is: Given a geographical area to be explored by a set of UAVs, how to plan a path that ensures that all nodes in the given area are covered while minimizing the distance traveled by the UAVs. We propose an algorithm that determines the complete coverage path, this creates a path for exploration that every node in the path will be visited exactly once while minimizing the total distance traveled by the UAV. We illustrate that our approach can also be applied in the case of multiple UAVs that can fly simultaneously over that area thus minimizing the exploration time.