Energy-aware coverage path planning of UAVs

Coverage path planning is the operation of finding a path that covers all the points of a specific area. Thanks to the recent advances of hardware technology, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are starting to be used for photogrammetric sensing of large areas in several application domains, such as agriculture, rescuing, and surveillance. However, most of the research focused on finding the optimal path taking only geometrical constraints into account, without considering the peculiar features of the robot, like available energy, weight, maximum speed, sensor resolution, etc. This paper proposes an energy-aware path planning algorithm that minimizes energy consumption while satisfying a set of other requirements, such as coverage and resolution. The algorithm is based on an energy model derived from real measurements. Finally, the proposed approach is validated through a set of experiments.