MVO-based path planning scheme with coordination of UAVs in 3-D environment

The path planning of UAV deals with the process of figuring the most optimal path from the source to the destination and avoiding obstacles on course to avoid collisions in a given environment. This particular problem is classified as an optimisation problem in high dimension and comes under the category of NP-Hard. Due to the usage of UAVs in many domains like the army, communications, security, disaster management, survey mapping etc., the provisioning of time efficiency as well as accuracy is a critical and challenging task in a 3-D environment. Moreover, the ability of the UAVs can be enhanced if there is coordination between them to find the best cost-effective target in a dynamic manner. However, a majority of the solutions reported theoretically are not efficient concerning time efficiency, accuracy and coordination simultaneously for many applications. Drawing motivation from this, the paper gives a novel way of solving the problem of planning of path for UAVs in 3-D while maintaining the coordination for choosing the target. A new algorithm based on Multiverse optimizer (MVO) algorithm is applied to the problem. Munkres algorithm is applied for coordination of UAVs in case of multiple targets. By carrying out the simulations, on three different maps over 50 iterations the results shows that MVO algorithm perform better in the most of the cases for finding optimized path cost with minimum average execution time when compared to meta-heuristics GSO and BBO. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.