Cooperative Area Coverage Path Planning for Multiple UAVs Over Large Areas

With the popularity and development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, the UAV coverage path planning problem has also emerged. In this paper, we propose a new model of UA V coverage path planning problem, which uses multiple UAVs to cover a certain large area cooperatively, and considers the energy constraint of UA Vs on flight distance, UA V energy replenishment and UA V recovery in the coverage process. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to solve the problem. In the first stage, we propose a region decomposition method based on a regular triangular grid, which converts the search region into a graph composed of nodes and edges. In the second stage, we use mixed linear integer programming (MILP) method to plan the coverage path based on the graph generated in the first stage. We use the actual parameters such as the drone's own camera, speed, energy, etc. to dissecte a rectangular area and accurately solve the MILP model, in the process of solving we designed three different scenarios to verify the feasibility and versatility of the model, and the solution results meet the expectations. We also observed the effect of UA V base location on the solving speed and the effect of UA V flight altitude on the model solving target value.