Revisiting Boustrophedon Coverage Path Planning as a Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem

In this paper, we present a path planner for low-altitude terrain coverage in known environments with unmanned rotary-wing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Airborne systems can assist humanitarian demining by surveying suspected hazardous areas (SHAs) cameras, ground-penetrating synthetic aperture radar (GPSAR), and metal detectors. Most available implementations MAVs do not consider obstacles thus cannot be deployed obstructed environments. We describe an open-source framework to perform planning polygon flight corridors obstacles. Our extends boustrophedon optimizing over different sweep combinations find the optimal path, considers during transition flights between cells. evaluate on 320 maps show that it is able solve realistic instances fast enough run field. The achieves 14% lower costs than conventional planner. validate real platform where sloped trees.