Spraying Coverage Path Planning for Agriculture Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Aiming at improving the efficiency of pesticide application from crop spraying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), this paper investigates problems in spray distribution modelling and coverage path planning (CPP). To capture the pattern of spray, the distribution model is constructed by making use of experimental data and the model fitting method. To obtain feasible way-points being tracked and reduce the computational burden, the coverage path planning problem is divided into flight speed and index-width optimization, where the relationship between flight parameters and spraying model is utilized. We show through the simulation study that distribution function can capture the effect of UAV’s flight height and rotor thrust level on the spray distribution, and the proposed CPP methodology is able to deliver the variable rate application of pesticide.