A Distributed Multi-UAV Path Planning Approach for 3D Environments Rasche, Christoph Stern, Claudius Kleinjohann, Lisa Kleinjohann, Bernd During rescue scenarios it is indispensable to obtain an overview of the situation. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can gather the necessary information in a fast and efficient way. This paper presents an approach for path planning in 3D environments offering a solution to explore disaster areas including, e.g., partially or completely destroyed buildings. Using multiple UAVs decreases the time needed to receive a complete overview if the problem of coordination and task allocation is solved. We present an approach for the use of multiple UAVs. The UAVs work in a distributed manner without any central coordination instance and cover the exploration of terrains as well as goal-oriented path planning. When using multiple UAVs redundant exploration is avoided through the use of inter-UAV-communication. The approach is based on potential fields and uses the simplicity of the gradient method to calculate paths for fast exploration of the terrain. 2011 info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject doc-type:conferenceObject text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/26660 Rasche C, Stern C, Kleinjohann L, Kleinjohann B. A Distributed Multi-UAV Path Planning Approach for 3D Environments. In: <i>The 5th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications (ICARA 2011)</i>. ; 2011. eng info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess