Concentrated Coverage Path Planning Algorithm of UAV Formation for Aerial Photography

In the field of aerial photography, UAVs can be used as an ideal carrier of sensors. It is meaningful to plan its coverage path combined with the sensor model. Previous works mainly used decentralized coverage to realize UAV formation cooperative operation, but for the aerial photography scene of a single task, the decentralized coverage algorithm is not effective. In this paper, a centralized coverage algorithm of UAV formation for aerial photography is proposed, which is divided into two sub-problems: coverage path planning and formation control. In the coverage path planning, due to high repetition rate and excessive number of turns of the traditional PRM algorithm, the constraint of the number of turns is introduced, and the back-and-forth mode is used to improve it. In formation control, in order to more accurately evaluate the performance of the coverage path, it refers to the consensus theory and combines the artificial potential field method to guide the reverse-V UAV formation to follow the coverage path. Multi-group simulations show that the proposed algorithm is feasible to implement the concentrated coverage for aerial photography under the comprehensive consideration of path length, number of turns, calculation time, coverage rate and repeating rate.