Trajectory-based Traveling Salesman Problem for Multirotor UAVs

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has been steadily gaining momentum. With technological advancements, UAVs are proving to be extremely useful in a variety of application scenarios. These include monitoring and inspection of large infrastructures and energy facilities such as offshore wind farms, power lines, roads, oil and gas pipelines [1]-[4], monitoring of cultivated land and forests [4], [5], in the mining industry [6], layout planning and digital reconstruction in construction [7] and for damage assessment after disaster events [8], [9]. To perform aerial flights in the above-mentioned use cases, two aspects are of crucial importance. On the one hand, the individual waypoints of a mission have to be put in a suitable order to minimize unnecessary time and energy consumption. This aspect is covered by solving route planning problems such as the NP-hard Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is discussed in detail in [10].