Parallel Multiobjective Multiverse Optimizer for Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in a Dynamic Environment with Moving Obstacles

Abstract

Path planning with collision avoidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in environments with moving obstacles is a complex process of navigation, often considered a hard optimization problem. Ordinary resolution algorithms may fail to provide flyable and collision-free paths under the time-consumption constraints required by the dynamic 3D environment. In this paper, a new parallel multiobjective multiverse optimizer (PMOMVO) is proposed and successfully applied to deal with the increased computation time of the UAV path planning problem in dynamic 3D environments. Collision constraints with moving obstacles and narrow pass zones were established based on a mathematical characterization of any intersection with lines connecting two consecutive drones’ positions. For the implementation, a multicore central processing unit (CPU) architecture was proposed according to the concept of master–slave processing parallelization. Each subswarm of the entire PMOMVO population was granted to a corresponding slave, and representative solutions were selected and shared with the master core. Slaves sent their local Pareto fronts to the CPU core representing the master that merged the received set of nondominated solutions and built a global Pareto front. Demonstrative results and nonparametric ANOVA statistical analyses were carried out to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed PMOMVO algorithm compared to other homologous, multiobjective metaheuristics.

Keywords

• unmanned aerial vehicles
• path planning
• collision avoidance
• moving obstacles
• parallel multiobjective multiverse optimizer
• master–slave parallelization