Route Optimization Method for Unmanned Air Vehicle Launched from a Carrier

In this paper, we propose a route optimization method for a carrier-launched Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV). In a real life use case, the carrier keeps on moving on its own route as the UAV executes its own mission of visiting the targets dispersed on a geographical area. Due to carrier mobility, determining the UAV take-off and land-on locations with a route which minimizes the total tour length is a crucial research question and a practical challenge. In order to resolve this problem, we have designed a solution based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA). We have observed the performance of the proposed approach on some well-known TSP problems by comparing its results against the results of the Nearest Neighbor (NN) heuristic.