Optimal Trajectory Planning of UAVs in Transport Aircraft Delivery Mode

When the mission points are far away from the drone base, the UAVs may not be able to reach the mission points due to the limited flight distance of the UAVs. In this paper, a transport aircraft is used to convey the UAVs to the vicinity of the mission points, and then the UAVs are released to perform the tasks. Considering that the mission points need to be approached or reached at a specific angle, and to meet the maximum curvature constraint of the fixed-wing UAVs, the paths are generated using the Dubins curves. In this paper, a hierarchical solution architecture is suggested to solve the NP-hard problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of UAVs. Firstly, the target points are clustered. Then use the simulated annealing algorithm in each cluster to find the delivery position and angle of the transport aircraft that minimizes the total energy consumption of the UAVs. Finally, the genetic algorithm is used to solve the delivery sequence with the shortest flight path of the transport aircraft and generate the flight trajectories of the UAVs and the transport aircraft. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed planning method.