An efficient decomposition-based cooperative path planning method for multiple UAVs

This paper presents an efficient decomposition-based method to solve the multi-UAV cooperative path planning problem. The decomposition contains two parts. One is to decompose the multi-UAV cooperative planning problem into successive single UAV planning problems. The other is to decompose the three-dimensional planning problem into horizontal planning and vertical planning problem. A successive planning scheme is employed for generating the UAV paths to alleviate the high computation on the coupled constraints. For each vehicle, the path is generated in the horizontal plane and vertical plane hierarchically to improve the efficiency. In the horizontal plane, a given-range-constrained sparse A* search (GRC-SAS) algorithm is proposed to generate the feasible paths meeting the requirements of time cooperation. And in the vertical plane, an improved altitude-pursuing method is proposed to determine the altitude of each waypoint. Simulation results show that the proposed method can provide satisfied paths for multi-UAV cooperation efficiently and is an appealing method for practical engineering.