Autonomous Flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Evolutionary Algorithms

Abstract

This article explores the application of evolutionary algorithms and agent-oriented programming to solve the problem of searching and monitoring objectives through a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles. The subproblem of static off-line planning is studied to find initial flight plans for each vehicle in the fleet, using evolutionary algorithms to achieve compromise values between the size of the explored area, the proximity of the vehicles, and the monitoring of points of interest defined in the area. The results obtained in the experimental analysis on representative instances of the surveillance problem indicate that the proposed techniques are capable of computing effective flight plans.