Energy‐optimal coverage path planning on topographic map for environment survey with unmanned aerial vehicles

An energy‐optimal coverage path planning algorithm is proposed for environment survey. First, 3D terrains are modelled by tensor product Bezier surfaces for a mesh representation. Then, a power estimator is derived to calculate the consumed energy for a piecewise spatial path. Based on the digital surface model, an energy consumption map is constructed for the whole area by means of a weighted directed graph. Finally, an energy‐optimal path can be achieved through traversing the map by a genetic algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.