Grid-based Coverage Path Planning with Minimum Energy over Irregular-shaped Areas with UAVs

Grid-based methods have been proposed to solve the Coverage Path Planning problem using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in irregular-shaped areas since simple geometric flight patterns, such as the back-and-forth, are inefficient in this type of scenario. However, the grid-based methods usually apply simplistic cost functions and demand high computational time leading to inefficient and expensive paths, making them not usable in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces an energy-aware grid-based approach aimed at minimizing energy consumption during mapping missions over irregular-shaped areas. Our work was built upon a previously proposed grid-based approach. Here we introduce an energy-aware cost function based on an accurate energy model. The proposed approach was able to save up to 17% of energy in real flight experiments, proving that the original cost function was not capable of finding the optimal solution in terms of real energy measurements. Additional simulation experiments were also performed to state the energy savings in different irregular-shaped scenarios. As a further contribution, we also applied two pruning techniques to the original approach dropping the computation time up to 99%.