PONE-D-22-12234Optimal Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Targets Touring: Geometric and Arc Parameterization ApproachesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Rizvi,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hector Vazquez-Leal

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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[M. Forkan would like to express his gratitude to Ministry of

National Science & Technology, Bangladesh for providing financial help in the form of

NST fellowship with Reference no. 120005100-3821117, Reg. no. 9 & Session: 2020-2021.]

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 [M. Forkan received grants from Ministry of National Science & Technology, Bangladesh for providing financial help in the form of NST fellowship with Reference no. 120005100-3821117, Reg. no. 9 & Session: 2020-2021.]

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Authors,

The optimal path planning for UAVs is an interesting problem. The authors develop an interesting proposal.

Please, consider the following comments:

1) Perform a comparison with other similar methods of literature

2) Report the computation time for the simulations

3) Report the memory consumption for each simulation

4) Please validate your proposal with a real robot.

5) Please, extend the explanation about how you will deal with obstacle avoidance in a future work, give more details.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper presents an optimal path planning model for UAVs to control their direction during target touring, where the UAV and target are at the same altitude. In this sense, the problem is performed on a 2-D space in which the orientation of the UAV is considered.

The paper is well structured, however, some sections need to be modified to improve the presentation and improve the content of this work:

1. Figure 1 and its description should be explained in a little more detail since the interpretation is confusing.

2. Equation 3 should be revised.

3. Equations 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 are not written in a standard math text. Review notation for "sin, arg, cos, for all".

4. The authors can enrich the explanation of section 4 using algorithms or flow charts.

5. The results of section 5 should be contrasted with the results of similar works. In addition, it is essential that the authors place the computation time and the amount of memory spend to obtain each result.

Reviewer #2: The paper is interesting, and presents a congruent mathematical analysis. I consider that the use of the drone at the same height should be justified in a solid way, as this is a point of improvement to the proposed analysis. I also consider that more experiments with radii of circumferences smaller than 2 should be shown.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-22-12234R1Optimal Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Targets Touring: Geometric and Arc Parameterization ApproachesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Rizvi,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 22 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hector Vazquez-Leal

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

The authors improved de manuscript. However, they must address the comments from the reviewer that ask for major revisions.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The document has substantially improved, however, some points mentioned above must be addressed and discussed in the respective sections.

1. Some mathematical expressions in section 3 are not numbered.

2. The comparison between the present work and similar ones is not clear, it is recommended to extend it in the discussion. Additionally, it is recommended to compare with more recent works less than 7 years old. If there are no recent works with which to compare, it is because the topic is not of interest, or what is the cause?

3. The authors report a memory consumption of 29228 MB, is this the data stored during the simulation in ROM (Hard Disk) memory?

Reviewer #2: no comment, I think it's ready

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Optimal Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Targets Touring: Geometric and Arc Parameterization Approaches

PONE-D-22-12234R2

Dear Dr. Rizvi,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Hector Vazquez-Leal

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE