Path Planning of UAVs Swarm Using Ant Colony System

In study of suppressing the surface target using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles swarm, path planning is important issue to be solved. Formation flight in well-regular paths could not find target exhaustively. In virtue of waypoints selection method in path planning of robots, the similar idea is adopted. In order to address the problem of computationally expensive for multi-vehicles, a benefit function is presented for path planning of UAVs swarm and a virtual driven force and a field of view of UAV is provided as the constraints. Meanwhile, the algorithm of Ant Colony System is applied to search the best solution to settle the problem of cooperative path planning in exhaustive area search. Simulation results show that this method could generate cooperative paths for UAVs swarm.