Mission-oriented cooperative 3D path planning for modular solar-powered aircraft with energy optimization

Modular Solar-Powered Aircraft(M-SPA)is a kind of High-Altitude Long-Endurance(HALE)aircraft which exploits the mission advantage of swarm UAV and the HALE advantage of large aspect-ratio SPA.M-SPA's separated mode and combined mode give it the potential to maximize the mission efficiency with limited solar energy.In this paper,firstly,oriented by the mis-sion of maximizing the cruise area,the overall design of the M-SPA is modeled,including the energy model,the aerodynamic model and the flight environment settings.Secondly,by analyzing the energy consumption of the flight modes,we design a multi-phase flight mission strategy.Then,a 24-hour three-dimensional(3D)flight profile of the M-SPA is optimized,including the sub-SPA cooperative path planning in the separation mode.Finally,inspired by the Traveling Salesman Problem(TSP),an improved Ant Colony Algorithm(ACA)is exploited to find the optimal path for each sub-SPA,which is further developed into a dynamic separation and combination scheme for the M-SPA.The simulation results show that the mission performance of the M-SPA outper-forms that of the conventional SPA,and explicitly,the mission coverage of the M-SPA is slightly less than a linear increase under comparable simulation conditions.