A rapid unmanned aerial vehicle inspection path planning method based on hybrid heuristic algorithm

Abstract

The advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing technologies has fueled interest in automatic UAV inspection path planning based on inspection tasks. However, traditional methods suffer from limitations such as manual operation, inability to find optimized paths, and lengthy time consumption. We propose a rapid UAV inspection path planning method using a hybrid heuristic algorithm in this paper. First, real-world data is abstracted into a graph. Then, a hybrid heuristic algorithm is proposed and used to determine an optimal inspection path considering the tasks and power parameters of the UAV. Finally, the total power consumption for the mission is computed to assess UAV battery capacity adequacy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of both performance and accuracy.