A Practical Interlacing-Based Coverage Path Planning Method for Fixed-Wing UAV Photogrammetry in Convex Polygon Regions

This paper investigates the coverage path planning problem for a fixed-wing UAV in convex polygon regions with several practical task requirements in photogrammetry considered. A typical camera model pointing forward-down for photogrammetric application is developed. In addition, the coordinates of the region vertices are converted from the WGS-84 coordinate system to the local ENU coordinate system for path planning convenience. The relationship between the minimum turning radius and the camera footprint is fully studied and the span coefficient of the fixed-wing UAV is first proposed. A novel flight pattern, named as the interlaced back-and-forth pattern in this paper, is presented accordingly. The proposed algorithm is compared with a traditional back-and-forth pattern in mathematics and several important results are given. Then, a practical low-computation algorithm for waypoints generation is developed. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.