Trajectory Planning of the Wireless-Powered UAV in Wireless Charging Network

The development of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology presents a promising avenue to support rechargeable UAVs in executing a wide range of energy-intensive tasks. However, most UAV path-planning schemes focus solely on task completion and maximizing coverage, often overlooking how UAVs should navigate in the presence of multiple charging stations organized as a wireless charging network that can replenish their power. This paper studies the problem of determining the service points serving the ground users as well as the trajectory of the wireless-powered UAV in the wireless charging network to maximize the total user-UAV communication utility. To this end, we formulate an optimization problem under typical path constraints, which introduces significant complexity. We propose a novel algorithm, where an improved k-means++ algorithm is employed to determine potential service points for the UAV, and the optimized trajectory is generated at each step by comparing the quantified communication utility and energy consumption utility. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation experiments. Our results demonstrate 8.68% ~ 158.74% improvement compared with comparison algorithms.