Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Path Planning Based on Improved Intelligent Water Drop Algorithm

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been a research focus in recent years and the path planner is a key element of the UAV autonomous control module. In this paper, a novel UAV path planning method based on intelligent water drop algorithm is proposed. Firstly, the mathematical model of the UAV path planning problem is presented. Secondly, an improved intelligent water drop algorithm is proposed to solve the UAV path planning model. In the proposed algorithm, a novel path construction mechanism is proposed and an adaptive global soli update mechanism is developed. The proposed algorithm can overcome some shortages of the original ITD algorithm, such as slow search speed, easily falling into local minima, and so on. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed planner outperforms the original ITD planner in a statistical manner.