Genetic Algorithm based UAV Trajectory Design in Wireless Power Transfer Systems

Abstract

In this work, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) system with multiple ground users. We aim at solving the non-convex UAV trajectory design problem which maximizes the minimal received energy among all users by determining the UAV's flying path under given UAV speed constraints. To solve such intractable problem, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based successive hover-and-fly (SHF) scheme that iteratively searches the optimal hovering points and optimizes the corresponding hovering time. Moreover, we extend the study to scenarios with no-fly zones, for which an improved GA based method with a penalizing strategy is proposed accordingly. Numerical results confirm the performance advantage of the proposed GA based algorithm in comparison to the benchmark algorithms in prior works under a wide range of system parameters.