On the Energy Consumption of a Quadcopter Navigating in an Orchard Environment

The problem of efficient motion planning is of significant interest in precision agriculture. We propose a mechanism to estimate it via Bezier function parametrization of the position, velocity and acceleration profiles for a quadcopter system. This is done by providing closed-form descriptions of the cost components, which are further incorporated into the overall motion planning problem to analyze the effect of various tuning parameters (such as total flight time, maximum velocity and acceleration). The ideas are tested over a proof-of-concept orchard navigation setup (challenging due to the close grouping of the way-points) with the final goal being thee comparison between horizontal-first and vertical-first path construction.