ACO for a new TSP in region coverage

An unmanned reconnaissance aerial vehicle mounted sensor of footprint with a small area /spl omega//sub s//sup 2/ is used to cover critical airbase structures for damage assessment. The region of coverage interest is modeled with a closed union of a minimal set of interior disjoint rectangles of width /spl omega//sub i/ = /spl omega//sub s/. We wish to find a minimum-length flight path for complete coverage for the nonholonomic vehicle. We prove that our minimization problem is a traveling salesman problem (TSP) that is symmetric, non-Euclidean and satisfies the triangular inequality. We compare our modeling primitive with two simple primitives commonly used for representing coverage regions. An ant colony optimization heuristic for solving the TSP is presented.