On the covering of a polygonal region with fixed size rectangles with an application towards aerial inspection

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with remote visual sensing can be used in wide range of applications. However, guaranteeing the full coverage of the area and translating this coverage in a path planning problem, it is a quite challenging task. Thus, in this article a well-known and well-investigated family of hard optimization problems, covering a polygonal region (target area) with fixed size rectangles (camera frustrum), is studied. The problem is formulated mathematically and solved using metaheuristic optimization algorithms. The proposed novel algorithmic scheme requires an a priori 2D model of the target area, while it tries to maximize the coverage with a minimum number of fixed size rectangles. Finally, multiple simulation results are presented that prove the efficacy of the proposed scheme.