Complete coverage path planning for pests-ridden in precision agriculture using UAV

Abstract

The contribution of this work focuses on generating the best path for an UAV to distribute medicine to all the infected areas of an agriculture environment which contains non-convex obstacles, pest-free areas and pests-ridden areas. The algorithm for generating this trajectory can save the working time and the amount of medicine to be distributed to the whole agriculture infected areas. From the information on the map regarding the coordinates of the obstacles, non-infected areas, and infected areas, the infected areas are divided into several non-overlapping regions by using a clustering technique. There is a trade-off between the number of classes generated and the area of all the pests-ridden areas. After that, a polygon will be found to cover each of these infected regions. However, obstacles may occupy part of the area of these polygons that have been created previously. Each polygon that is occupied in part by obstacles can be further divided into a minimum number of obstacle-free convex polygons. Then, an optimal path length of boustrophedon trajectory will be created for each convex polygon that has been created for the UAV to follow. Finally, this paper deals with the process of creating a minimal path for the UAV to move between all the constructed convex polygons and generate the final trajectory for the UAV which ensures that all the infected agriculture areas will be covered by the medicine. The algorithm of the proposed method has been tested on MATLAB and can be used in precision agriculture.