Path Planning Optimization for Agricultural Spraying Robots Using Hybrid Dragonfly – Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Finding collision-free paths and optimized path coverage over an agricultural landscape has been a critical research problem among scientists and researchers over the years. Key precision farming strategies such as seeding, spraying fertilizers, and harvesting require special path planning techniques for efficient operations and will directly influence reducing the running cost of the farm. The main objective of this research work is to generate an optimized sequential route in an agricultural landscape with the nominal distance. In this proposed work, a novel Hybrid Dragonfly – Cuckoo Search algorithm is proposed and implemented to generate the sequential route for achieving spraying applications in greenhouse environments. Here the agricultural routing problem is expressed as a Travelling Salesman Problem, and the simulations are performed to find the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm has generated better results when compared with other computational techniques such as PSO in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency.