Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (4): 1206-1213.doi: 10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2025.04.17

• Systems Engineering • Previous Articles     Next Articles

UAV coverage path planning for aircraft surface visual inspection

Wei CHEN1, Congqing WANG1,*, Qiang ZENG2, Zhan LI2   

  1. 1. College of Automation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China
    2. Aviation Industry Corporation of China(Guizhou)Company, Limited, Aviation Industry Corporation of China, Ltd., Anshun 561000, China
  • Received:2023-08-28 Online:2025-04-25 Published:2025-05-28
  • Contact: Congqing WANG

Abstract:

In order to efficiently plan the flight paths for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) conducting visual inspection tasks on aircraft surface, a coverage path planning algorithm is proposed by using an adaptive hybrid sampling strategy, which involves viewpoint generation, viewpoint selection, and coverage path planning to determine the optimal inspection path for UAV. Firstly, optimal line-of-sight sampling and adaptive supplementary sampling are performed based on the aircraft model to be inspected to generate a redundant set of viewpoints. Secondly, a heuristic graph search algorithm based on dynamic weighting is adopted to search and select a set of effective viewpoints to offer incremental coverage. Finally, a path collision detection module is designed in the original Lin-Kernighan heuristic (LKH) algorithm and the improved LKH algorithm is used to solve UAV collisionless inspection path.Simulation experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves max aircraft surface coverage rates of 93.44% and 96.44% of the aircraft inspection paths planned in two different scenarios, which outperforms other comparative algorithms in terms of path length, number of viewpoints, and algorithmic time consumption.

Key words: aircraft surface inspection, coverage path planning, adaptive hybrid sampling, graph search algorithm, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

CLC Number: 

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