Coverage Path Planning for UAV Based on Improved Back-and-Forth Mode

In the field of aerial photography, complete coverage path planning (CCPP) is the key to improving the task efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with a limited battery capacity. Previous CCPP algorithms consisted of Cellular Decomposition (CD) class, Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) class, and Bio-inspired Neural Network (BINN) class. However, when faced with the complex environment of multiple forbidden areas, CD and PRM have high computational complexity and a long path length, and BINN has a large number of turns. In this paper, an improved back-and-forth (IBF) algorithm is proposed to achieve good performance in these three aspects at the same time based on a newly straight-turn mode and the corresponding auxiliary approaches (i.e. Local Traversal, Global Traversal, and continuity constraint function). An important difference between straight-turn mode and back-and-forth mode is that the next straight direction is not restricted to being parallel to the last straight direction but is determined by Local Traversal, which is introduced to evaluate the benefits of different paths and find the best direction for the next straight-turn mode at the ending cell. Global Traversal is available to choose a “jump” cell when “Dead zone” are faced. The continuity constraint function is used to maintain the continuity of the unexplored area. Under the comprehensive consideration of path length, computation time, and number of turns, the simulation and experimental results indicate that the proposed IBF algorithm has better performance in multiple forbidden areas.