Abstract: The coverage flight path planning is very important to enhance the UAV’s abilities of reconnaissance and target searching. From the viewpoints of energy, route length and duration, the turning motion is proved to be less efficient compared with the flat flying theoretically. The definitions of span and width for convex polygons are given, and the problem of coverage flight path planning in a convex polygon area is transformed to the width calculation of the convex polygon. A high performance vertex-edge algorithm to obtain the width of a convex polygon is given based on the theorem which proves that only vertex-edge pairs need to be considered in the computation of the width. If a UAV flies along the direction of parallel lines of support with the obtaining of width, the coverage path can get the least number of turns. Finally, a simulation is implemented and the result proves that the proposed algorithm can solve the problem of coverage flight path planning in a convex polygon efficiently.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicles, convex polygon area, coverage flight path planning, span, width