Research on UAV route optimization in complex terrains

As the rotorcraft technology has developed rapidly in recent years, more and more rotorcrafts have been employed in agricultural scenarios, for example, the remote sensing, plant protection and pesticide spraying. Benefit of its light weight and vertical take-off and landing, the agricultural rotorcrafts are used in the complex terrains, such as the hilly fields and terraced fields. In such context, operation routes are rather curvy to follow up the plants in irregular arrangement, but the curvy route tracking would cause maneuvering of the rotorcraft and its downwash swing. This paper aims to plan appropriate flight path for the UAV to decrease the unnecessary maneuvers and droplet deviation during agricultural operation in order to improve the spray efficiency and reduce environmental pollution as far as possible. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.