Abstract:To address the urgent demands for global optimization, dynamic obstacle avoidance and terrain following in UAV route planning within complex three-dimensional environments, an adaptive chaotic optimization ant colony algorithm (ACACO) was studied; by designing adaptive pheromone evaporation factor and goal-oriented heuristic function varying with iteration process, dynamic balance between exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm was achieved; chaotic mapping was introduced to perturb population initialization and pheromone update, effectively enhancing global optimization ability; a composite cost function integrating range, dynamic threat and terrain elevation was constructed; simulation results show that compared with traditional ant colony algorithm (ACO), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and improved snow avalanche algorithm (SAA), ACACO algorithm reduces average path length by 11.1%, improves smoothness by 28%, achieves dynamic threat avoidance success rate of 96.7%, and reduces average convergence iterations by 53.1%; in the "Returning Fishing Grounds to the River" judicial enforcement case in Yangtze River basin, automatic terrain-following survey and dynamic patrol were applied, verifying engineering applicability and control effectiveness in complex scenarios; this research provides an effective algorithmic solution for intelligent route planning of UAVs in inspection, mapping and other fields.