Aerial remote sensing in agriculture: A practical approach to area coverage and path planning for fleets of mini aerial robots

Abstract

In this paper, a system that allows applying precision agriculture techniques is described. The application is based on the deployment of a team of unmanned aerial vehicles that are able to take georeferenced pictures in order to create a full map by applying mosaicking procedures for postprocessing. The main contribution of this work is practical experimentation with an integrated tool. Contributions in different fields are also reported. Among them is a new one-phase automatic task partitioning manager, which is based on negotiation among the aerial vehicles, considering their state and capabilities. Once the individual tasks are assigned, an optimal path planning algorithm is in charge of determining the best path for each vehicle to follow. Also, a robust flight control based on the use of a control law that improves the maneuverability of the quadrotors has been designed. A set of field tests was performed in order to analyze all the capabilities of the system, from task negotiations to final performance. These experiments also allowed testing control robustness under different weather conditions. C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Hybrid mission planning with coalition formation

“…One combination that has been extensively studied in the literature is multi-robot task allocation and path planning to the task location (Barrientos et al, 2011;Woosley and Dasgupta, 2013;Moon et al, 2013;Turpin et al, 2013;Zhu et al, 2013;Turpin et al, 2014;Ma and Koenig, 2016). The task allocation and path planning problem is for single-agent tasks executed by single-task robots.…”

Coordinated Control of Multi-Robot Systems: A Survey

“…During the last decade, multi-robot systems have gone from isolated and anecdotal laboratory systems to robustly deployed across a number of domains, such as warehousing [1]- [3], precision agriculture [4], [5], search-and-rescue [6], [7], and environmental monitoring and exploration [8]- [10]. The fundamental reason why more robots are preferable in these types of domains is that there is strength in numbers.…”

Complete Coverage Path Planning for a Multi-UAV Response System in Post-Earthquake Assessment

“…Li et al [23] studied an exact cellular decomposition method for UAV path planning in a polygon region. For the purpose of precision agriculture mapping, Barrientos et al [24] performed an experiment using an integrated tool. Initially, they subdivided the polygon area and then conducted path planning for each subarea using a multi-UAV system.…”