Energy-aware Coverage Path Planning of Multi-UAV Based on Relative Distance Scaling Cluster Method

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial photography becomes a new method of disaster area exploration. UAVs have been widely used in the fields for aerial photography, monitoring, transportation, communication and so on. They can expand the dimension and scale of search and rescue (SAR) work, reduce the cost of human and material resources, and improve the efficiency of SAR work. Considering the limited of a single UAV, multi-UAV and energy-aware path planning algorithms are proposed here for SAR missions, which improve the cluster algorithm. In the algorithm design, we take the energy consumption of each UAV as an important factor for optimizing the division of search area, and propose the spiral search path generation algorithm. And numerical examples corroborate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.