UAV Path Planning with Terrain Constraints for Aerial Scanning

A global path planning method constrained by dynamics, kinematics, and terrain is proposed for Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Firstly, new constant-altitude waypoints are interpolated above the terrain based on altitude information and terrain resolution. Account for the coverage of airborne sensors over the surface area, a horizontal waypoint interpolation optimization (HOPT) is performed at positions with excessive bending in the horizontal direction. Secondly, for vertical plane optimization (VOPT), i.e., height optimization, a Soft Actor-Critic-based Particle Swarm Optimization (SAC-PSO) is employed to optimize the convergence speed of the method and achieve terrain following (TF). Thirdly, to evaluate the generated paths, a deep residual network (DRSN) is designed to mitigate the impact of optimization failures during the iteration process and improve the stability of the algorithm. Simulation experiments demonstrate the efficiency and path quality of the proposed method, while real-world tasks validate its practicality.