Research on Path Planning of Plant Protection UAV Based on Grid Method and Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly emerged as a new technology in the fields of plant protection and pest controlling. The flight path planning is a key point of plant protection UAV, which directly affects the efficiency of spraying process. In this work, a novel method of planning spraying path for multiple irregular discontinuous working areas is proposed. Based on traditional grid method, the improved grid method is applied to reduce transitional working path for irregular working areas. Using the improved ant colony algorithm, a shortest total flight path between multiple discontinuous regions is designed. The results show that the optimized flight path based on this method is shortened about 4.46% and has broad prospects for application.