Stealth coverage multi-path corridors planning for UAV fleet

An improved niched genetic algorithm (NGA) is presented for 3-dimensional (3D) coverage stealth path corridors real-time planning of heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) low-altitude penetration in dynamic environments. Firstly, the constraints of path planning were described and the problem was formulated. 3D path corridor was introduced to meet the requirements of the kinematic constraints of UAV fleet. Secondly, NGA was improved by merging neighborhood field operator and rollback operator to speed up the convergence rate. In addition, the K-means crowding strategy was employed to generate multiple coverage paths in the searching space. Simulation results demonstrate that real-time high quality flight corridors for UAVs can be obtained by using the proposed algorithm.