UAV Path Planning Study in 3D Obstacle-Avoidance Environment of Nuclear Power Plant

With the continuous development of technology, the application of UAVs in nuclear power plants will play an increasingly important role in operation and maintenance, contributing to the sustainable development of the nuclear energy industry. Various pressure vessels, containment vessels and other primary circuit pipelines are existed inside the nuclear power plant, so there are many obstacles in the inspection environment of UAV. At present, various algorithms are used to realize the UAV path planning in the environment of obstacles. In this paper, we apply three UAV path planning algorithms to the 3D obstacle-avoidance environment of nuclear power plants, including A* algorithm, RRT and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Simultaneously, three different 3D obstacle scenarios were simulated for the UAV inspection task of nuclear power plant, and the path planning performance of these three algorithms is compared and analyzed.