2D multi-area coverage path planning using L-SHADE in simulated ocean survey

Abstract

Ocean environmental surveys typically involve multi-area coverage path planning tasks. The most important problem is improving the coverage efficiency of the task. A new path planning method based on Successful History-Based Adaptive Differential Evolution variants with Linear population size reduction(L-SHADE) is presented to solve this problem. The method comprises two parts: the part of sub area coverage path planning and the part of finding the optimized sequence of sub area start points. The key idea is establishing the relationship between the starting point of each sub area and the optimized multi-area path. We implement the method through numbering the possible starting point of sub area path and proposing a computing formula. In addition, the results of L-SHADE mutation process are optimized which make L-SHADE possible to apply in multi-area coverage path planning. This method avoids area discretization and exponential growth of computational quantities, and it is suitable for complex areas as well as multi-area. The simulation results with MATLAB showed the improvement of coverage path planning task execution efficiency. Compared with the method thinking of the sub area as the center of it, our method reduced the multi-area coverage path length by 4%–7%. From the simulations and analysis, we concluded that the method is able to improve the efficiency and stability of multi-area coverage path planning.