Complete coverage path planning for aerial vehicle flocks deployed in outdoor environments

This paper presents a system for Complete Coverage Path Planning to survey an outdoor area with a flock of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The proposed system is able to manage the presence of no-fly zones, by decomposing the area into smaller subregions via a Morse-based decomposition approach. Furthermore, negotiation for UAV-subregion assignment is managed, taking into account environment geometry and both starting and desired final positions for the UAVs, once the coverage mission is completed. The back-and-forth motion is chosen as coverage pattern inside each subregion. All these features have been implemented with an integrated software framework, capable of working with georeferenced maps and data structures, thus obtaining a software tool compatible with commonly used geographic information systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.