Adaptive Elite Differential Gold Rush Optimizer for Three-Dimensional UAV Path Planning in Complex Mountainous Environments

To improve the reliability and path quality of three-dimensional UAV path planning in complex mountainous environments, this paper proposes an Adaptive Elite Differential Gold Rush Optimizer (AEDGRO). The main novelty of AEDGRO lies in the coordinated integration of three enhancement mechanisms into the original Gold Rush Optimizer: chaotic good-point initialization for improving initial population coverage, adaptive elite differential mining for strengthening exploitation around promising regions, and stagnation-aware Gaussian–Cauchy mutation for escaping local optima. A UAV path-planning model is constructed by considering path length, altitude fluctuation, trajectory smoothness, terrain collision avoidance, threat-region avoidance, and UAV safety clearance. The experimental results on the IEEE CEC2017 benchmark suite show that AEDGRO obtains the best Friedman average ranking of 1.63, outperforming the original GRO with a ranking of 4.80. In the UAV path-planning experiments, AEDGRO achieves the lowest mean fitness value of 235.69 and the smallest standard deviation of 7.55, indicating better path quality and stronger robustness than the compared algorithms. The generated trajectories are smoother and can effectively avoid mountainous terrain and threat regions. These results demonstrate that AEDGRO has clear advantages in global optimization accuracy, convergence stability, and UAV path-planning applicability.