Low-Altitude UAV Trajectory Optimization for Complex 3D Terrains Based on Energy Consumption

With the widespread use of UAV technology in industries such as environmental monitoring, smart agriculture, and geographic mapping, optimizing the energy efficiency of UAVs with limited battery capacity has become a major concern. Traditional trajectory planning research is restricted to two-dimensional techniques and employs a simplified energy consumption model, making it impossible to adequately reflect the true influence of diverse terrain on flight energy consumption. This work presents a three-dimensional flight energy consumption model and proposes a novel low-altitude trajectory planning method based on an upgraded ant colony algorithm. A dynamic pheromone updating mechanism and an elite approach are used to maximize the heuristic formulation of the climb energy consumption coefficient and obstruction penalty coefficient. Simulation experiments with real topographic data from Jiuzhaigou Valley show that the proposed method reduces energy usage by <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$9.1 \%-36.3 \%$</tex> when compared to existing greedy algorithms while maintaining comprehensive coverage.