Energy Efficient Elliptical Concave Visibility Graph Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in an Obstacle-rich Environment

This paper proposes a path planning algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called Elliptical Concave Visibility Graph (ECoVG). The algorithm, which is based on visibility graph (VG), overcomes the limitations of VG computation time and hence, it can be applied in real-time and in obstacle-rich environments. An experimental investigation has been done to compare the performance between ECoVG and another VG based method namely Equilateral-Space Oriented VG (ESOVG) in terms of computational time and path length. The investigation was done in identical scenarios through simulation to show that the ECoVG has a better computation time than that of ESOVG for its efficient selection of a region in calculating the path. It is also found that the proposed algorithm is energy efficient and complete since it can find a path if one exists.