A new static path planning strategy for drones

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been progressively used in environmental monitoring and disaster sensing. The drones fly over a set of waypoints in the area to achieve their surveillance task. Despite their potential advantages, UAVs have several drawbacks, including a limited energy supply and a short operational duration which make all attempts at planning ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel UAV path planning for the monitoring task that considerably reduces energy consumption and minimizes the number of turns with minimum overlapping. In addition, the proposed path gives the whole area the same level of importance. The proposed path was compared with four static paths: back and forth, spiral, LMAT, and Zamboni. Results show that the proposed path allows a better coverage with less energy consumption than the state-of-the-art methods.