Region Coverage Path Planning of Multiple Disconnected Convex Polygons Based on Simulated Annealing Algorithm

Over the past decades, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in both industrial and military operations around the world. As part of mission planning, path planning will play a key role in improving the viability and mission capabilities of UAVs. However, the problem of multi-region coverage path planning is limited by many factors such as UAV's performance, endurance and target region. In this paper, an improved simulated annealing algorithm (ISA) has been proposed to solve the problem. The ISA method uses simulated annealing algorithm to determine the access order of regions, takes minimum-distance-first strategy to select the entry of region, and uses back-and-forth path (BFP) to cover the convex polygon region. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulation experiments with randomly generated targets.