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This paper presents a path planning approach for rotary unmanned aerial vehicles (R-UAVs) in a known static rough terrain environment. This approach aims to find collision-free and feasible paths with minimum altitude, length and angle variable rate. First, a three-dimensional (3D) modeling method is proposed to reduce the computation burden of the dynamic models of R-UAVs. Considering the length, height and tuning angle of a path, the path planning of R-UAVs is described as a tri-objective optimization problem. Then, an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed. To render the algorithm more effective in dealing with this problem, a vibration function is introduced into the collided solutions to improve the algorithm efficiency. Meanwhile, the selection of the global best position is taken into account by the reference point method. Finally, the experimental environment is built with the help of the Google map and the 3D terrain generator World Machine. Experimental results under two different rough terrains from Guilin and Lanzhou of China demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithm in finding Pareto optimal paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]