Path Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Peak Power Minimization.

Utilization of moving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Accordingly, path planning to optimize a given utility function, such as mechanical energy, has been the subject of many works. In a prior work, we have proposed path panning schemes to uniformly cover an area for communication coverage and surveillance applications with minimum mechanical energy. As far as energy and power minimization is concerned, an important issue that is sometimes being overlooked is the peak-power that the UAV has to afford to provide the path planning of interest. In this paper, we address this issue and find paths that provide a uniform coverage with minimum peak power. We then compare the results with the case where mechanical energy was minimized. This is done for fixed-wing as well as rotary-wing UAVs. It is observed that depending on the UAV specs, we can expect a mild increase (7% in our case) in peak power in some cases when going from peak power optimized scenario to energy optimized scenario. There are also cases where there is no major difference between the 2 scenarios.