Coverage Path Planning for Holonomic UAVs via Uniaxial-Feasible, Gap-Severity Guided Decomposition
Modern coverage path planning (CPP) for holonomic UAVs in emergency response must contend with diverse environments where regions of interest (ROIs) often take the form of highly irregular polygons, characterized by asymmetric shapes, dense clusters of concavities, and multiple internal holes. Modern CPP pipelines typically rely on decomposition strategies that overfragment such polygons into numerous subregions. This increases the number of sweep segments and connectors, which in turn adds inter-region travel and forces more frequent reorientation. These effects ultimately result in longer completion times and degraded trajectory quality. We address this with a decomposition strategy that applies a recursive dual-axis monotonicity criterion, with cuts guided by a cumulative gap severity metric. This approach distributes clusters of concavities more evenly across subregions and produces a minimal set of partitions that remain sweepable under a parallel-track maneuver. We pair this with a global optimizer that jointly selects sweep paths and inter-partition transitions to minimize total path length, transition overhead, and turn count. We demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the lowest mean path-length and completion-time overhead among 15 other CPP pipelines.