Near-Optimal Coverage Path Planning of Distributed Regions for Aerial Robots with Energy Constraint

Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) have gained immense popularity for area coverage having applications such as environmental monitoring, demining, search and rescue, among others. Most of the existing studies exploring area coverage have considered only a single region, however, few recent studies have considered coverage of multiple distributed regions. One of the limitations which UAV suffers while covering distributed multiple regions is energy constraints where complete area coverage is not possible. From a strategical point of view, we propose a novel algorithm which solves a variant of area coverage problem where the UAV aims to achieve near-optimal area coverage due to path length limitation caused by the energy constraint. In this paper, a preliminary study is conducted by first formulating the problem and later on presenting a solution. The solution has been partitioned into two inter-dependent sub-problems: i) inter-region coverage, ii) intra-region coverage. The performance of the algorithm has been evaluated by analysing its properties over an exhaustive set of test case scenarios and comparing it against two state-of-the-art area coverage approaches.