Abstract:

Under the limited communication range of the base station, if the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) often returns to the communication range of the base station to realize intermittent information transmission when conducting covering searching task, it can expand its coverage area and improve the flexibility of the execution of the mission. In order to minimize the sum of time for the information of all environmental sites to be transmitted back to the base station, the coupling problem of coverage planning and timing of intermittent communication should be solved. When the target points to be covered are few and scattered, the improved hierarchical clustering method is used to obtain the set of path points that need to be covered in each round trip. When it is necessary to carry out full coverage of the region, the following methods are adopted: after obtaining the coverage path of the region, the objective function is analyzed to minimize the sum of time, and the search range of optimal return times is determined to compress the solution space. The optimal round-trip times are obtained by traversing the search range, and then genetic algorithm is used to optimize the UAV return sites. Compared with the advanced algorithms, the objective function value and the quality of coverage path of the proposed algorithm is significantly improved.

Key words: communication coupling, hierarchical clustering, solution space compression, genetic algorithm