  Aerial drones have great potential to monitor large areas quickly and
efficiently. Aquaculture is an industry that requires continuous water quality
data to successfully grow and harvest fish. The Hybrid Aerial Underwater
Robotic System (HAUCS) is designed to collect water quality data of aquaculture
ponds to reduce labor costs for farmers. The routing of drones to cover each
fish pond on an aquaculture farm can be reduced to the Vehicle Routing Problem.
A dataset is created to simulate the distribution of ponds on a farm and is
used to assess the HAUCS Path Planning Algorithm (HPP). Its performance is
compared with the Google Linear Optimization Package (GLOP) and a Graph
Attention Model (AM) for routing problems. GLOP is the most efficient solver
for 50 to 200 ponds at the expense of long run times, while HPP outperforms the
other methods in solution quality and run time for instances larger than 200
ponds.
