Bipartite Cooperative Coevolution for Energy-Aware Coverage Path Planning of UAVs

The coverage path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a complex optimization problem in practice, especially for those involving multiple target areas. It is challenging to comprehensively plan the inter-area visiting order and the intra-area coverage paths simultaneously. Due to the battery limitation, usually the task can hardly be finished by a single UAV, and instead a fleet of UAVs are required. In this article, we first formulate an energy-aware multi-UAV multi-area coverage path planning (EM ² CPP) model, in order to characterize the practical path planning requirements of UAVs in complex conditions. Subsequently, to accomplish the optimization task, we propose a bipartite cooperative coevolution (BiCC) algorithm that coevolves an inter-area path planning and an intra-area path planning components to obtain good solutions. The basic operators in BiCC, such as the initialization and the reproduction operators, are tailored for the task of EM ² CPP. Besides, we also develop a fast heuristic algorithm for EM ² CPP, which is able to produce approximate solutions in a short time. Simulations on real-world datasets validate the good performance of the proposed methods.