Methodological Foundations of Optimal Swarm Management of UAVs in Energy Crop Spraying with Agrochemical Agents

The work is dedicated to research on optimal swarm management of UAVs in spraying energy crops with agrochemical agents. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that currently, the solution to plant protection tasks using UAVs is based on the individual experience of a human operator who manages the UAV swarm, typically in a non-optimal manner, resulting in significant time and cost expenses. The article aims to develop methodological foundations for optimal UAV swarm management in spraying energy crops with agrochemical agents. To achieve this objective, the following tasks were accomplished: the formulation of the optimization task for UAV swarm management was justified, taking into account constraints on time and cost expenditures for plant protection tasks; a method for optimal UAV swarm management in the spraying of energy crops with agrochemical agents and foliar feeding was developed, ensuring the solution to the task of maximizing the number of treated plants in each field section while considering constraints on time and cost; a structural scheme for solving the optimization task of UAV swarm management was developed for the effective execution of plant protection tasks. The scientific novelty of this work lies in the application of dynamic programming methods for the allocation and management of UAV swarms on each field section during the spraying of energy crops with agrochemical agents. The practical significance of the work is manifested in developing a structural scheme for solving the optimization task of UAV swarm management. Through this scheme, specialized software at the automated operator's workstation calculates the optimal number of UAVs in a specific temporal sequence, ensuring the effective execution of plant protection and feeding tasks.