Cooperative Operation Path Planning for Multiple Plant Protection UAVs Based on Bi-level ACO

Abstract

AbstractIn order to improve the cooperative operation efficiency of multi-plant protection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the operation field segmentation algorithm is used to divide the complex field into several sub-fields, and then the scanning line method and the step rotation method are used to obtain the endpoint set of operation path for each sub-field. A bi-level ant colony optimization algorithm (bi-level ACO) is proposed, which includes task assignment level ACO and path planning level ACO. The former is used to assign the sub-fields to each UAV, while the latter is used to realize the path planning of sub-fields assigned to each UAV. What’s more, in the task assignment level ACO, the total operation path length index and the task assignment equilibrium index are introduced in the pheromone update. The two level ACOs iterate in loop to realize the cooperative optimization of task assignment and path planning for multiple plant protection UAVs. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by a simulation case.KeywordsMulti-plant protection UAVsCooperative operationTask assignmentPath planningBi-level ACO