Enabling Autonomous Navigation on the Farm: A Mission Planner for Agricultural Tasks

Abstract

This study presents the development of a route planner, called Mission Planner, for an agricultural weeding robot that generates efficient and safe routes both in the field and on the farm using a graph-based approach. This planner optimizes the robot’s motion throughout the farm and performs weed management tasks tailored for high-power laser devices in narrow-row crops (wheat, barley, etc.) and wide-row crops (sugar beet, maize, etc.). Three main algorithms were integrated: Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the most optimal route on the farm, the VRMP (Visibility Road-Map Planner) method to select the route within cultivated fields when roads are not visible, and an improved version of the Hamiltonian path to find the best route between the crop lines. The results support the effectiveness of the strategies implemented, demonstrating that a robot can safely and efficiently navigate through the entire farm and perform an agricultural treatment, in this case study, in laser-based weed management. In addition, it was found that the route planner reduced the robot’s operation time, thus improving the overall efficiency of precision agriculture.

Integrated Route-Planning System for Agricultural Robots

“…Agricultural machinery, although highly automated and capable of performing precision tasks such as variable rate applications, only managed to become part of an integrated system in recent years, through the two-way communication between machines and information technologies such as cloud-based farm management information systems, making it relevant to the smart farming concept. This evolution is an exemplification of the transition from precision agriculture (task-specific approach) to smart farming (system-specific approach) [23].…”

YOLOv7-Based Intelligent Weed Detection and Laser Weeding System Research: Targeting Veronica didyma in Winter Rapeseed Fields

“…In general, weeds can cause a 10% to 20% reduction in rapeseed production, and in severe cases, it can even reduce production by 50% [10]. The main methods of weed control currently used include manual weeding [11], chemical weeding [12], mechanical weeding [13,14], biotechnological weeding [15], and thermal power weeding [16,17]. Among them, manual weeding, chemical weeding, and mechanical weeding are the most commonly used methods in rapeseed fields.…”