UAVs Smart heuristics for Target Coverage and Path Planning Through Strategic Locations

The affordability and deployment-flexibility of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have ignited the development of many smart applications, including surveillance, disaster management, and smart farming. Drone's energy consumption is a critical issue and it can be controlled through different factors, depending on the application. One approach is to minimize energy consumption by defining a minimal number of strategic target-coverage locations that the drone needs to traverse and efficiently plan the drone's route through these locations. In this paper, we provide solutions that efficiently allow UAVs to cover multiple targets using their cameras. These solutions identify a minimum set of strategic locations that cover the targets and plan the drone's routes across these locations. We address the problem with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumed by the drone during its mission. We model the problem as mixed-integer programming problem and provide a set of heuristics; with and without target clustering. We evaluate the system using simulations. The results indicate the significance of clustering in minimizing the number of strategic locations and saving the drone's energy. Moreover, flexibility in selecting cluster centers provides further reduction in the strategic locations and energy consumption.