A Coverage Path Planning Method Based on Multiple Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper proposes a solution to solve the coverage path planning (CPP) problem of multi-solar unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and the research content of this paper is as follows. First, the energy production model and consumption model of the solar UAV are established, and according to this model, the flying speed of the solar UAV are determined. Besides, the energy flow efficiency is defined to evaluate the energy utilization efficiency of this operation. After that, transform the CPP problem into vehicle routing problem (VRP), and a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is established to determine the flight path of each UAV with the objective of minimizing operation time. In this method, the solar UAV is used for CPP, which solves the problem of short flight time of traditional UAV. Operation time is used as the objective function to solve the CPP, so that the task can be completed as soon as possible. And the calculation of energy flow efficiency can be used to evaluate the operation efficiency of solar UAV.