Min-max Path Planning of Multiple UAVs for Autonomous Inspection

In this paper, we study the path planning for autonomous inspection with multiple UAVs in a certain area to minimize the maximum flight distance of the UAV. Particularly, the UAVs are dispatched from the same depot to visit all inspection points, and finally return to the depot. Each inspection point is visited by only one UAV. Since the min-max path planning is NP-hard, we transform this problem by replacing the minimum Hamiltonian cycle length of each UAV with the average cycle length. Then, we decouple it into two subproblems, i.e., task allocation and trajectory design, and solve them respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than conventional GA-mTSP method.