A Preliminary Investigation into Use of Jaya Algorithm for Area Segmentation of Large Palm Oil Plantations

The production of palm oil on a commercial scale is labour intensive with many of its processes handled by humans. In some countries, there can be as many as 500,000 plantation workers in the palm oil sector as the plantations are usually large. However, such dependence on humans for low skills manual work has led to many problems. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) have been seen as a possible alternative to support some of the processes that require low skills in the palm oil industry. However, the flying time of the UAVs is finite and hence it is important to maximize the number of palm trees that each UAV can service. This paper proposes the segmentation of large palm oil estates into smaller areas to be modeled as a bin packing problem with the Jaya Algorithm. The resultant segmented areas would have an optimal number of palm trees that can be comfortably serviced by the UAV. Good results were achieved when tested on several datasets especially when compared to those computed by human experts.