Multiobjective UAV Path Planning for Emergency Information Collection and Transmission

Considering the problem of rapid collection and reliable transmission of emergency information, as well as the emergency response missions and natural environment characteristics of emergency sites, this article proposes a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning framework that considers waypoint and motion. First, the waypoint planning improves the reliability of the uplink and the downlink data transmission to the greatest extent by jointly optimizing UAVs 3-D position and transmit power of UAV and users' equipment (UE). Second, the motion planning allows the UAVs to traverse all waypoints in the shortest amount of time, which allows more time for data collection by maximizing the acceleration of each UAV. Our results show that the proposed path planning algorithm can significantly improve the normalized Quality-of-Experience (QoE) index and effectively shorten the flight time of each UAV for different assignments. Therefore, the method proposed in this article can effectively solve the key problems in the technical system of emergency response and provide a scientific decision-making basis for the post-disaster emergency response.