In many unmanned aerial systems (UAS) applications such as land assessment, search and rescue, UASs are often required to survey or scan multiple spatially distributed regions. To realize these applications, one of the most critical challenges to address is how to find the optimal paths for the UASs to cover multiple regions. This problem can be considered as a variant of the traveling salesmen problem (TSP) integrated with the coverage path planning (CPP) problem, which has been rarely studied in the literature. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation on this problem. The mathematical problem formulation is first provided, followed by two intra-regional path planning algorithms of different capabilities. An advanced dynamic programming (DP) based approach is then introduced that finds (sub-) optimal solutions for the integrated TSP-CPP problem. Numerical analysis and comparative simulation studies demonstrate the optimality of the proposed approaches.
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