Path Planning for Multiple UAVs Covering Disjoint Non-convex Areas

Philipp Wolf, Robin Heß, Klaus Schilling

Abstract: Rescue and security applications call for fast mapping of complex environments. For this purpose we propose a planner that generates paths for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that need to cover multiple disjoint non-convex polygonal areas with nadir pointing cameras of varying field of view. These fulfill a user specified overlap to allow for taken images being used in different map generation procedures. The proposed planner first decomposes the given areas into suitably sized convex subareas. These are allocated to the available UAVs by a metaheuristic solver while minimizing the longest path of all involved UAVs. Given the allocation, subareas are adjusted by a developed heuristic to satisfy the overlap constraints at the inner borders of the split areas. Finally paths allowing for scanning the areas are generated. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate and validate the results of the planner.