Estimation of Distribution Algorithms based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle path planner using a new coordinate system

Path planning technique is vital to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been widely used in planning path for UAV. In these EA-based path planners, Cartesian coordinate system and polar coordinate system are commonly used to codify the path. However, either of them has its drawback: Cartesian coordinate systems result in an enormous search space, whilst polar coordinate systems are unfit for local modifications resulting e.g., from mutation and/ or crossover. In order to overcome these two drawbacks, we solve the UAV path planning in a new coordinate system. As the new coordinate system is only a rotation of Cartesian coordinate system, it is inherently easy for local modification. Besides, this new coordinate system has successfully reduced the search space by explicitly dividing the mission space into several subspaces. Within this new coordinate system, an Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) based path planner is proposed in this paper. Some experiments have been designed to test different aspects of the new path planner. The results show the effectiveness of this planner.