Path Planning with Time Windows for Multiple UAVs Based on Gray Wolf Algorithm

Changchun Zhang; Yifan Liu; Chunhe Hu

doi:10.3390/biomimetics7040225

Path Planning with Time Windows for Multiple UAVs Based on Gray Wolf Algorithm

Biomimetics (Basel). 2022 Dec 3;7(4):225. doi: 10.3390/biomimetics7040225.

Authors

Changchun Zhang^{1

2}, Yifan Liu^{1

2}, Chunhe Hu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China.
² Research Center for Biodiversity Intelligent Monitoring, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China.

Abstract

The Gray Wolf (GWO) algorithm aims to address the path planning problem of multiple UAVs, and the scene setting is mainly to avoid threats, meet the constraints of UAVs themselves and avoid obstacles between UAVs. The scene setting is relatively simple. To address such problems, the problem of time windows is considered in this paper, so that the UAV can arrive at the same time, and the Gray Wolf algorithm is used to optimize the problem. Finally, the experimental results verify that the proposed method can plan a safe flight path in the process of multi-UAV flight and reach the goal point at the same time. The mean error of flight time between UAVs of the GWO is 0.213, which is superior to PSO (0.382), AFO (0.315) and GA (0.825).

Keywords: GWO; multi-UAV; path planning; swarm intelligence; time windows.

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61703047).