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This article presents a scalable coverage partition-and-path planning (SCoPP) method that provides time-efficient coverage with workload balanced plans for each robot in the team. Non-convex coverage areas and no-fly zones within are also taken into consideration. SCoPP partitions the specified area into as many regions as the number of robots in the team, via area discretization into cells, clustering of cells into partitions and load-balanced auctioning of cells that lie on the interpartition boundaries. Subsequently it generates an ordered list of waypoints for each robot to visit using a nearest-neighbor path planning primitive. Two additional subroutines modify this last step to allow user-prioritized locations to be visited earlier than other locations or prior to a specified deadline. Using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform post-flood survey is considered as the example application to evaluate performance over different sized areas. SCoPP demonstrates superior performance compared to one baseline, and competitive trade-offs among mission completion efficiency, workload balancing and computing time, compared to another recent baseline. SCoPP and its prioritized subroutines provide promising scalability with a team size of up to 150 UAVs, while keeping computing times to within a few minutes. An outdoor experimental validation of SCoPP with a small team of three UAVs is also provided to demonstrate the deployment potential of SCoPP.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1115\/1.4071466","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,24]],"date-time":"2026-03-24T14:37:26Z","timestamp":1774363046000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1115\/crossmarkpolicy-asme","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Efficient Planning for Scalable and Load-Balanced Area Coverage by Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles"],"prefix":"10.1115","volume":"26","author":[{"given":"Prajit","family":"KrisshnaKumar","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01y64my43","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}],"name":"University at Buffalo Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, , , \u00a0","place":["Buffalo, NY, 14260"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jhoel","family":"Witter","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01y64my43","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}],"name":"University at Buffalo Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, , , \u00a0","place":["Buffalo, NY, 14260"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Leighton","family":"Collins","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01y64my43","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}],"name":"University at Buffalo Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, , , \u00a0","place":["Buffalo, NY, 14260"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jagadeswara P. 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