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The ability of an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in an unknown environment is a prerequisite for its execution of complex tasks and is the main research direction in related fields. The autonomous navigation of UAVs in unknown environments requires solving the problem of autonomous exploration of the surrounding environment and path planning, which determines whether the drones can complete mission-based flights safely and efficiently. Existing UAV autonomous flight systems hardly perform well in terms of efficient exploration and flight trajectory quality. This paper establishes an integrated solution for autonomous exploration and path planning. In terms of autonomous exploration, frontier-based and sampling-based exploration strategies are integrated to achieve fast and effective exploration performance. In the study of path planning in complex environments, an advanced Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm combining the adaptive weights and dynamic step size is proposed, which effectively solves the problem of balancing flight time and trajectory quality. Then, this paper uses the Hermite difference polynomial to optimization the trajectory generated by the RRT algorithm. We named proposed UAV autonomous flight system as Frontier and Sampling-based Exploration and Advanced RRT Planner system (FSEPlanner). Simulation performs in both apartment and maze environment, and results show that the proposed FSEPlanner algorithm achieves greatly improved time consumption and path distances, and the smoothed path is more in line with the actual flight needs of a UAV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, due to the strong mobility, easy deployment, and low cost of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), great interest has arisen in utilizing UAVs to assist in wireless communication, especially for on-demand deployment in emergency situations and temporary events. However, UAVs can only provide users with data transmission services through wireless backhaul links established with a ground base station, and the limited capacity of the wireless backhaul link would limit the transmission speed of UAVs. Therefore, this paper designed a UAV-assisted wireless communication system that used cache technology and realized the transmission of multi-user data by using the mobility of UAVs and wireless cache technology. Considering the limited storage space and energy of UAVs, the joint optimization problem of the UAV's trajectory, cache placement, and transmission power was established to minimize the mission time of the UAV. Since this problem was a non-convex problem, it was decomposed into three sub-problems: trajectory optimization, cache placement optimization, and power allocation optimization. An iterative algorithm based on the successive convex approximation and alternate optimization techniques was proposed to solve these three optimization problems. Finally, in the power allocation optimization, the proposed algorithm was improved by changing the optimization objective function. Numerical results showed that the algorithm had good performance and could effectively reduce the task completion time of the UAV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]