Optimal Path Selection of UAV in Daily Maintenance of Expressway Slopes

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained special attention in recent years, among others in monitoring and inspection applications. We used UAV to analyze the characteristics of the slopes of Hanning Expressway and designed different aerial photography solutions. Compared with manual inspection, the work efficiency increased by 43.5%. Then, we selected the suspicious damage points as the collection points for the second inspection, and introduced the adjacency matrix to describe the situation between the collection points. We used the ant colony algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm and genetic algorithm to solve the shortest path. The results showed that the simulated annealing algorithm was the optimal algorithm.