Collaborative Vehicle-Mounted Multi-UAV Routing and Scheduling Optimization for Remote Sensing Observations

Vehicle-mounted multi-UAV (VM-UAV) systems offer enhanced flexibility and rapid deployment for large-scale remote sensing tasks such as disaster response and land surveys. However, maximizing their operational efficiency remains challenging, as it requires the simultaneous resolution of task scheduling and coverage path planning—an NP-hard problem. This study presents a novel multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) framework that jointly optimizes routing and scheduling for cost-constrained, load-balanced multi-UAV remote sensing missions. To improve convergence speed and solution quality, we introduce two innovative operators: a Multi-Region Edge Recombination Crossover (MRECX) to preserve superior path segments from parents and an Adaptive Hybrid Mutation (AHM) mechanism that dynamically adjusts mutation strategies to balance exploration and exploitation. The algorithm minimizes total flight distance while equalizing workload distribution among UAVs. Extensive simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed GA significantly outperforms conventional GA, particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), and clustering-based planning methods in both solution quality and robustness. The practical applicability of our framework is further validated through two real-world case studies. The results confirm that the proposed approach delivers an effective and scalable solution for vehicle-mounted multi-UAV scheduling and path planning, enhancing operational efficiency in time-critical remote sensing applications.