An Improved Slime Mold Algorithm for Cooperative Path Planning of Multi-UAVs*

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are widely used in military and civilian applications as an emerging control technology. Due to the stringent coordination requirements and constraints, multi-UAV path planning in three-dimensional complex environments is more challenging. To solve this problem, A collaborative method for planning multiple UAVs paths in complex environments is proposed. The SMA algorithm is improved in terms of the initial position of the population, the feedback factor and the individual position update method, which improves the convergence speed and convergence accuracy as well as the robustness of the algorithm. Simulation results in complex cases show that the proposed algorithm can obtain effective paths in multi-UAV collaborative path planning, and the overall performance is improved by 9.5% compared to the SMA algorithm.