Route Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on the Sea Using Hybrid Differential Evolution and Quantum-Behaved Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper presents a hybrid differential evolution (DE) with quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) route planning on the sea. The proposed method, denoted as DEQPSO, combines the DE algorithm with the QPSO algorithm in an attempt to further enhance the performance of both algorithms. The route planning for UAV on the sea is formulated as an optimization problem. A simple method of pretreatment to the terrain environment is proposed. A novel route planner for UAV is designed to generate a safe and flyable path in the presence of different threat environments based on the DEQPSO algorithm. To show the high performance of the proposed method, the DEQPSO algorithm is compared with the real-valued genetic algorithm, DE, standard particle swarm optimization (PSO), hybrid particle swarm with differential evolution operator, and QPSO in terms of the solution quality, robustness, and the convergence property. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of generating higher quality paths efficiently for UAV than any other tested optimization algorithms.