Abstract
Aiming at the problem of low operating efficiency due to the poor endurance of plant protection rotor drones and the small volume of pesticide carried, this paper proposes a route-planning algorithm for convex polygon regions based on the initial heading angle. First, a series of coordinate conversion methods ranging from the Earth coordinate system to the local plane coordinate system are studied. Second, in the local plane coordinate system, a route generation method based on subregion is proposed; therefore, multiple routes can be generated with different initial heading angles. Lastly, the optimal route and the best initial heading angle can be obtained after the comparison according to the three evaluation criteria: number of turns, route distance, and pesticide waste rate. The simulation results show that, compared with the common grid method, the route generation method based on subregion reduces the route distance and pesticide waste rate by 2.27% and 13.75%, respectively. Furthermore, it also shows that, compared with the route generated by the initial heading angle of 0°, the optimal route reduces the number of turns, route distance, and pesticide waste rate by 60%, 17.65%, and 38.18%, respectively. The route was optimized in three aspects and reached the best overall result using this method, which in turn proved its feasibility.
Highlights
Applying drones in plant protection owns the characteristics of uniform pesticide spraying, high efficiency, low cost, and high security; as such, drones have been widely used in the agriculture field [1,2,3,4]
In order to ensure the uniformity of the pesticide, this paper proposes a new route generation method based on subregion, and this method makes sure that the energy and pesticide consumption of the generated routes is optimal, which allows analyzing the optimal route among different routes
The operation region was a certain farmland in Beijing, China with an area of 5167 m2
Summary
Applying drones in plant protection owns the characteristics of uniform pesticide spraying, high efficiency, low cost, and high security; as such, drones have been widely used in the agriculture field [1,2,3,4]. Due to the large-scale circulation of land in China, especially in recent years, the demand for drone application has increased rapidly [5,6] Under such a background, the key problem of agriculture spraying has gradually changed from whether the crops get sprayed to how the crops get well sprayed. China mainly uses rotor drones for plant protection because they can ensure the uniformity of the pesticide on each crop in the operation region to a certain extent [9]. They have poor endurance and small pesticide capacity, reducing the efficiency of operation [10]. In order to maximize the energy utilization and the pesticide utilization of drones, it is urgent to develop a route-planning method to ensure that the crops get well sprayed while improving the efficiency of operation
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