Optimal ant colony algorithm for UAV airborne LiDAR route planning in densely vegetated areas

Abstract. In order to solve the problems of redundant data acquisition and sparse ground points in dense vegetation areas by conventional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning methods, an UAV-airborne LiDAR route optimization method for dense vegetation areas is proposed. First, based on the high-resolution true color remote sensing images of the study area, the “fuzzy” calculation of vegetation coverage for route planning is completed. Then, an optimized ant colony algorithm is proposed for route planning, which introduces vegetation coverage as a reference for route planning and optimizes the pheromone initialization, state transfer rules, pheromone calculation, and update strategies in the classical ant colony algorithm to obtain more ground points. The experimental results show that this method can take into account the vegetation coverage of the flight area and find the area with low vegetation coverage to complete the route planning and efficiently use the sweeping principle of three-dimensional laser scanning to improve the probability of ground point acquisition, with faster iteration speed than the classical ant colony algorithm, and improve the efficiency of ground point acquisition in dense vegetation areas.