UAV path planning based on a dual-strategy ant colony optimization algorithm

With the rapid development of modern communication and automatic control technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have increasingly gained importance in both military and civilian domains. Path planning, a critical aspect for achieving autonomous aerial navigation, has consistently been a focal point in UAV research. However, traditional ant colony algorithms need to be improved for the drawbacks of susceptibility to local optima and weak convergence capabilities. Consequently, a novel path planning methodology is proposed based on a dual-strategy ant colony algorithm. In detail, an improved state transition probability rule is introduced, redefining ant movement rules by integrating the state transition strategy of deterministic selection during the iterative process. Additionally, heuristic information on adjacent node distance and mountain height is added to further improve the search efficiency of the algorithm. Then, a new dynamically adjusted pheromone update strategy is proposed. The update strategy is continuously adjusted during the iteration process, which is beneficial to the algorithm’s global search in the early stage and accelerated convergence in the later stage, preventing the algorithm from falling into local optimality and improving its convergence. Based on the above improvements, a new variation of ant colony optimization (ACO) called dual-strategy ACO algorithm is formed. Experimental results prove that dual-strategy ACO has superior global search capabilities and convergence characteristics from four key aspects: path length, fitness values, iteration number, and running time.