Mission assignment and 3D path planning for a team of UAVs

Significant topics for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight are represented by path planning and task assignment in a 3D environment. In this paper we propose a mathematical formulation designed as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem that couples the two mentioned topics. This optimization problem provides an optimal solution for a problem where multiple drones have to individually paint some regions of interest. Several constraints were defined based on energy and paint consumption, while the cost function is based on the time for completing the painting task. For the proposed solution, the impact of number of drones, number of regions of interest and the size of the graph modelling the environment, is asserted and visualized through numerical simulations.