A Memetic Algorithm for Curvature-Constrained Path Planning of Messenger UAV in Air-Ground Coordination

This paper addresses a UAV path planning problem for a team of cooperating heterogeneous vehicles composed of one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The UGVs are used as mobile actuators and scattered in a large area. To achieve multi-UGV communication and collaboration, the UAV serves as a messenger to fly all UGVs to transmit information. The path planning of messenger UAV is formulated as a Dynamic Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhood (DDTSPN). A novel memetic algorithm is proposed to find the shortest route enabling the UAV to fly over all requested UGVs. In the memetic algorithm, the combination of genetic algorithm and local search is employed to find a high-quality solution in a reasonable time, and a gradient-based repair strategy is used to repair the individuals violating dynamic constraints. The calculation results on both small and large instances show that the proposed method can generate high-quality solutions as compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.