Energy-Efficient Path Planning for UAV Using Spatiotemporal Wind Model

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been deployed in various applications. The UAVs are limited in their flight duration owing to the payload, battery capacity, or wind effects. To address the issue, we propose an energy-efficient path planning method for UAVs that explicitly considers spatiotemporal wind speed. The proposed method exploits the wind-based energy consumption model as the cost function and also implements a variable-resolution grid in the graph search. The simulation study with 648 scenarios confirms the validity of the proposed method. Further, the statistical analysis of the simulation results summarizes the impact of wind and freight mass on UAV path plannings.