Abstract: This paper studies the path planning problem of full coverage operation of electric multi-rotor UAV with endurance con-straint. Firstly, a mathematical model of path planning for UAV full coverage operation with endurance constraints was established based on the scanline path generation method. Then, an improved ant colony optimization(ACO) was pro-posed for the dynamic change of path node topology in the path planning model. The ACO provides the judgment mecha-nism of UAV return time and calculation method of return point, designs the dynamic local distance matrix, and proposes the pheromone updating mechanism of rolling weight weighted sum, which takes into account both global and local heu-ristic information in the optimization process. Finally, an example of multi-field operation on regular terrain and complex terrain is used to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm

Key words: UAV, full coverage operation, path planning, endurance constraint, ACO