Area coverage using drones for Precision Agriculture
2022-26-1247
05/26/2022
- Content
- With the constant growth of the world population, the necessity for increasing productivity has become paramount owing to faster resource depletion. We have seen great leaps in the automation of agricultural operations which has sustained the increased demand for food. UAVs are one such technology with the potential to revolutionize the farming industry through precise and focused applications for crop inputs. In this work, a system that enables applying precision agriculture approach for crop monitoring, growth, and protection activities is described. This work focuses on designing a UAV system capable of maneuvering through agricultural fields addressing the problem of complete coverage of fields. Coverage Path Planning is the process of finding the route that covers all points of the specific area. Most of the research focused on finding the optimal path takes only geometrical aspects into account, while not considering context-specific robot features, energy, speed, and sensor capabilities. The planner presented aims to meet the capabilities of the equipped precision hardware to successfully perform agriculture tasks. The challenges addressed are - breaking down the target area into obstacle-free regions, determining entry and exit points to regions, optimal order to tour the regions, and complete coverage of each region. Multiple methods have been explored corresponding to each challenge to achieve the goal - Morse Decomposition and Boustrophedon Decomposition, Raster and Hilbert curves, Rotating Calipers method, Dijkstra’s and Genetic algorithm. The main contribution of this work is the practical implementation of the proposed path planning approach with an integrated tool. PX4 Autopilot with the ‘ ROS + Gazebo ’ framework is used for the simulation of the proposed approach. A set of simulations are performed in comprehensive agricultural environments with different wind conditions.
- Citation
- Karthikeyan, R., and Arya, H., "Area coverage using drones for Precision Agriculture," SAE Technical Paper 2022-26-1247, 2022, .