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A review of cooperative path planning of an unmanned aerial vehicle group

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Abstract

As a cutting-edge branch of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, the cooperation of a group of UAVs has attracted increasing attention from both civil and military sectors, due to its remarkable merits in functionality and flexibility for accomplishing complex extensive tasks, e.g., search and rescue, fire-fighting, reconnaissance, and surveillance. Cooperative path planning (CPP) is a key problem for a UAV group in executing tasks collectively. In this paper, an attempt is made to perform a comprehensive review of the research on CPP for UAV groups. First, a generalized optimization framework of CPP problems is proposed from the viewpoint of three key elements, i.e., task, UAV group, and environment, as a basis for a comprehensive classification of different types of CPP problems. By following the proposed framework, a taxonomy for the classification of existing CPP problems is proposed to describe different kinds of CPPs in a unified way. Then, a review and a statistical analysis are presented based on the taxonomy, emphasizing the coordinative elements in the existing CPP research. In addition, a collection of challenging CPP problems are provided to highlight future research directions.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Hao ZHANG conceived the idea of this review. Hao ZHANG and Li-hua DOU did literature research. Hao ZHANG drafted the manuscript. Bin XIN and Kaoru HIROTA helped organize the manuscript. Hao ZHANG, Bin XIN, and Jie CHEN revised and finalized the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bin Xin.

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Compliance with ethics guidelines

Hao ZHANG, Bin XIN, Li-hua DOU, Jie CHEN, and Kaoru HIROTA declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61822304, 61673058, 61621063, 61720106011, and 62088101), the NSFC-Zhejiang Joint Fund for the Integration of Industrialization and Informatization (No. U1609214), the Consulting Research Project of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (No. 2019-XZ-7), the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the Peng Cheng Laboratory

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Zhang, H., Xin, B., Dou, Lh. et al. A review of cooperative path planning of an unmanned aerial vehicle group. Front Inform Technol Electron Eng 21, 1671–1694 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000228

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000228

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