Research On Route Planning For Plant Protection Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

As a kind of newly developing intelligent equipment in agricultural,the plant protection unmanned aerial vehicle is a hi-tech research focus and related to technologies in areas of mechanical and electrical integration,computer,information communication,automatic control and geographic information.Route planning is an important part of the autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles,and the quality of route planning will directly affect the energy consumption and pesticide consumption of plant protection UAVs.Currently plant protection UAVs mainly rely too much on artificial remote,the flight routes are not planned precisely and the actual flight routes are often serious difference with theoretical,and there are few researches on route planning method of plant protection UAV,and some of the research have relative limitations.Therefore,this paper made an in-depth study on route planning method of plant protection UAV,and proposed several route planning methods according to the operating environment and application requirements,realized the effective optimization of energy consumption and pesticide consumption.Environment coordinate is built based on gauss projection,to convert operation area borders to coordinate volume,and coordinate transformation according to the operation direction,makes it easier to route planning computing.According to convex polygon operation,a kind of operation route planning method is proposed to extract the UAVs' operation routes in any specified operating directions quickly.The route planning algorithm can also give a recommended operation direction and route,without a specified operation direction,to make energy consumption and drug consumption minimal in the entire operation process.In the area of concave polygon operation,a route planning method based on operation heading was proposed to divide the operation area in sub-regions.In order to avoid too many scheduling route between sub-regions,a method based on the improved depth-first traversal algorithm was proposed to search the effective traversal route of the sub-region position relationship graph,achieved local merger of sub-regions,effectively reducing the number of sub-regions,so the non-operating route distance was reduced.Aiming at the single operation area with obstacle,the areas was divide into sub-regions by the boustrophedon cellular decomposition algorithm,this paper proposed a route planning method based on the Reeb graph and Euler circuit,the Eulerian Euler tour was constructed based on the Floyd algorithm and the Hungarian method,and sub-region scheduling sequence was achieved based on the improved Fleury Euler circuit algorithm,so the distance of the scheduling route was optimal.Aiming at the global route planning for multi-operation areas,a multi-operation area route scheduling planning method based on genetic algorithm was proposed.The traversal planning of the corresponding node of operating area was achieved based on the TSP problem solving method,to determine the coverage order of each area,and scheduling route planning among sub-regions was achieved based on the improved genetic algorithm,so the non-operating route distance and energy consumption of UAV was reduced,and the operational efficiency was improved.This paper also proposed a route planning method for plant protection UAVs in sorties,in order to reduce the ineffective energy consumption in non-operate situations,spraying amount and return points of the sorties were reasonable allocation to improve operational efficiency.This paper also developed an UAV route planning software,and achieved the funct:ion of operation area mapping,operating parameters set,route planning and waypoint export.Based on the research of route planning method and the route planning software development,the field experiment of UAV coverage operation was completed,and the experiment result verified the feasibility of the route planning metihods in this paper,by comparing with other planning methods,it proved the optimization of the route planning methods in this paper and their eflfectiveness of the practical application.The methods in this paper can save the energy consumption and pesticide consumption of the operation,they also save the manpower required for the route planning,making the operation management more convenient,they can help to promote the development of agricultural plant protection towards the direction of more intelligent,more efficient,energy saving and automatic.