Multi-Region Coverage Path Planning for Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Systems

Recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely adopted by military and civilian applications due to their strong autonomies and adaptabilities. Although UAVs can achieve effective cost reduction and flexibility enhancement in the development of systems with search or surveillance missions, they result in a complex path planning problem. Especially in region coverage systems, coverage path planning problem, which seeks a path that covers all regions of interest, has a NP-Hard computational complexity and is difficult to solve. In this paper, we study the coverage path planning problem for heterogeneous UAVs in multiple region systems. First, with the models of UAVs and regions, an exact formulation based on mixed integer linear programming is presented to produce an optimal coverage path. Then taking into account both the scanning time on regions and the flight time between regions, an efficient heuristic is proposed to assign regions and to obtain coverage orders for UAVs. Finally, experiments are conducted to show the reliability and efficiency of the proposed heuristic from several aspects.