An Analytical Solution for Obstacle Avoidance in Cooperative Area Coverage using UAV Swarms

In the context of employing a UAV swarm for reconnaissance in a designated area or multiple areas, it becomes imperative for the swarm to coordinate their movements in a cooperative manner. Performing a cooperative reconnaissance mission is usually easy when the targeted area is in free space. However, challenges arise when the area is obstructed by numerous obstacles, complicating the corresponding reconnaissance task. This paper focuses on the study of area coverage in environments with obstacles, presenting a two-stage method. In the initial stage, assuming the absence of obstacles, we propose a method for generating a multi-directional area coverage strategy. This strategy is based on a modified ant colony algorithm. Subsequently, in the second stage, we introduce an analytical method to adjust the coverage path from the first stage. This adjustment is designed to simultaneously achieve obstacle avoidance and complete area coverage. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated through two sets of simulations.