Multi-UAV Cooperative Path-Planning in Complex Terrain: A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach
Mitali Sil, Pratyusha Rakshit, Sayan Chatterjee, Abhishek Ghosh Roy, Archana Chowdhury · IETE Journal of Research · 2025
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized in domains such as environmental monitoring, military operations, and disaster response, where real-time coordination among multiple UAVs is crucial. However, cooperative multi-UAV path planning remains a complex challenge due to the need to balance conflicting objectives such as obstacle avoidance, inter-UAV collision prevention and path optimality. Most existing approaches address this problem through single-objective optimization using weighted aggregations, which often fail to fairly represent the tradeoffs and can lead to sub-optimal solutions. To overcome these limitations, this paper formulates the cooperative multi-UAV path-planning problem as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) task. A novel optimization algorithm – non-dominated sorting firefly algorithm (NSFA) – is proposed, which integrates non-dominated sorting into the classical firefly algorithm to guide the search toward the Pareto-optimal front efficiently. NSFA includes a new movement control mechanism that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation, thereby accelerating convergence while maintaining solution diversity and quality. Extensive experiments conducted in various simulated environments demonstrate that NSFA outperforms existing algorithms in both solution quality and convergence speed. In the best-case scenario, the proposed NSFA-based path planner demonstrates a 37% improvement in reducing the target objective function values. Its superior performance is further evidenced by a 20% reduction in task completion time compared to its competitors. Furthermore, the algorithm is successfully implemented on Parrot Mambo Mini drones in real-world scenarios, yielding results consistent with simulations. These findings validate the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed NSFA-based approach for cooperative path planning in multi-UAV systems.