Abstract: In order to solve the problem of short endurance of traditional electric UAV during coverage operations, this paper pro-posed to use multiple solar powered UAVs for coverage operations. Firstly, on the basis of establishing the energy model of the solar powered UAV applied to the coverage operations, the energy flow efficiency is proposed to evaluate the energy utilization rate of the solar powered UAV during the operation. Secondly, aiming at the concave polygon region with obstacles on the boundary and the polygon area with obstacles inside, with the shortest operation time as the optimization objective, the coverage path optimization model based on the undirected graph search method is pro-posed, and the constraint equations are defined to restrict the UAV to visit nodes of the undirected graph according to certain rules. The optimal flight path of each UAV is solved by the method of mixed integer linear programming. Thirdly, considering the influence of the attitude change on the energy flow efficiency when the UAV turns, taking the shortest operation time and the highest energy flow efficiency as the optimization objective at the same time, the double objec-tive optimization equation is established. Then on the basis of first solving the optimization goal with the shortest opera-tion time, the coverage flight direction and flight path with the relatively optimal energy flow efficiency and operation time are selected through a limited traversal method. A large number of simulation experiments show that the optimiza-tion model in this paper selects different optimization objectives and applies to different shapes of areas to be covered, which has wide applicability, fast calculation in Engineering and strong feasibility.

Key words: solar powered UAV, energy flow efficiency, undirected graph search, coverage path optimization model, double objectives optimization