Coverage Path Planning Based on Recursive Polygonal Decomposition for Multiple Regions

Coverage path planning (CPP) is a crucial challenge in UAV applications, entailing finding an optimal path to cover all targets or regions of interest. Although considerable research has been conducted on single-region CPP, studies on covering multiple scattered regions using multiple UAVs are relatively limited. In this paper, we firstly establish a mathematical model, aiming to find path with minimal energy consumption and least completion time. Then, a multi-strategies recursive optimal decomposition (MsROD) approach is presented to obtain the fewest sub-regions with the optimal coverage directions for CPP. Finally, in order to determine the optimal traveling order for each sub-region, we propose an coverage path adaptive neighborhood search (CPANS) that adopts novel operators for CPP. Experiments validated that the presented approaches exhibit the effectiveness and balance of calculation time in diverse scenarios.