Development of a UAV Path Planning Approach for Multi-building Inspection with Minimal Cost.

This paper presents a UAV path planning approach for multi-building inspection, which is a new application for UAV path planning. It generates helix paths for single building inspection first and defines the possible points for collecting inspection data with reasonable time slots. After inspecting one building, the UAV flies to another building with a trajectory based on a cost matrix and a visited vector defined in this algorithm. The planning of the entire inspection path is evaluated considering several factors, such as distance, time, and altitude. The proposed algorithm is applied to historical giant communal homes, Fujian Tulou, consisting of five buildings.