Boustrophedon coverage path planning for UAV aerial surveys in wind

© 2017 IEEE. In the quickly developing world of precision agriculture UAV remote sensing, there is a need for a greater understanding of winds effect on fixed wing aerial surveying, as this is missing from current literature. This paper presents a method to define and calculate flight times in a Boustrophedon aerial survey coverage path in wind, for a given convex polygon, at a given sweep angle. It is shown that there exists no easy way to define a sweep angle relative to the wind that minimises flight time. This method is validated by comparing the numerical simulated path and times with a number of surveys run in the high fidelity X-Plane simulator.