Coverage Path Planning Of Autonomous Marsupial Systems For Supporting Fruit Counting Process

Abstract

In this paper, an offline path planner, that generates optimal coverage paths for a marsupial vehicle system to support autonomous fruit counting in agriculture fields or orchards, is presented. The process of coverage path planning aims to search the route which covers every point of a given region of interest. The approach consists of using UAV aerial mapping to build occupancy grid maps and generating coverage path based on Iterative Structured Orientation Algorithm. The resultant path can be dispatched to the marsupial vehicle for the coverage area fruit counting. The evaluation results show that our proposed method is both feasible and efficient. Besides, it is expected to reduce human intervention in both data collection and data processing time, significantly.