Route planning for unmanned aerial vehicles with artificial bee colony

Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) is a non-pilot air vehicle which has two different modes of use, autonomous or remote control. UAVs that have been used for many years in military fields such as intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, have been also begun to applied to civilian fields such as remote sensing, data collection, search and rescue, fire fighting, agricultural applications, imaging and transportation recently. Much work has been doing to ensure that UAVs can autonomously to perform these tasks. An important one of these studies is planning of the route. A route planning for UAV is to find a feasible route from the starting point to the target point avoiding obstacles and dangerous areas. Many methods are used in order to solve route planning of UAVs. In addition to traditional algorithms, heuristic algorithms are also used to solve these problems. One of the most important reasons for using heuristic algorithms is to get good results in a short time. Traditional algorithms usually have high computational costs. In this study, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is used for route planning. Route planning could be defined as an optimization problem when it has considered to find shortest route. The ABC algorithm is one of the heuristic algorithms widely used in optimization problems in recent years. In the study, an interactive user interface is designed using C# programming language to implement the simulation of the ABC algorithm. At the first phase, the starting and ending points of route have been determined on map;at the second phase imaginary barriers have made by inputting latitude and longitude coordinates with using mouse on map or keyboard. At third phase some parameters have adjusted. In practice, the Google online map has been used and the coordinates and altitude information required for the route have been provided with this map. Experimental studies for route planning show that the ABC algorithm provides successful results in finding suitable routes.