Path Planning for Multiple Energy Constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Cover Multiple Regions
Junfei Xie, Wen Zhang, Jun Chen · AIAA AVIATION 2020 FORUM · 2020
In many UAV applications, such as land assessment, pasture management, and search and rescue, UAVs are often required to scan multiple regions. How to plan the paths for the UAVs to ensure mission success and minimize the cost is the first question arises in these applications. In this paper, we investigate this interesting problem and consider the scenario where multiple UAVs with limited energy are assigned to fully cover multiple convex polygonal regions. To solve this problem, we first provide its mathematical formulation and introduce some approximations to simplify the problem. We then propose a modified genetic algorithm to solve the problem efficiently, which is featured by a new chromosome design, new crossover and mutation operators, and a constraint-aware fitness function. Comparative simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.