Multi-Area Complete Coverage with Fixed-Wing UAV Swarms Based on Modified Ant Colony Algorithm

As a typical application, multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are usually sent to search for possible targets in chosen areas. In this paper, the multi-area complete coverage problem using fixed-wing UAV swarms is investigated, where the areas can be of arbitrary shape and size. For each area, its longitude direction, corresponding to the optimal sweep direction, is firstly found by the diameter function method, and is then used to compute the sweep waypoints. Observing that coverage gap and redundancy exist, we propose a waypoint adjustment procedure to achieve gap filling and redundancy eliminating. The problem can then be formulated as a multi-vehicle routing problem, and a modified ant colony algorithm is presented to address it. Finally a simulation example shows that 10 UAVs can cover 5 areas in 682.8 seconds.