An Improved Complete Coverage Path Planning Method for Intelligent Agricultural Machinery Based on Backtracking Method

• Main Authors: Han, Y. (Author), Shao, M. (Author), Wu, Y. (Author), Zhang, X. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2022
• Subjects: Agricultural machinery; agricultural operations; Agricultural operations; backtracking mechanism; Backtracking mechanism; complete coverage path planning; Complete coverage path planning; Complete coverages; Computational efficiency; Coverage path planning; Coverage rate; Energy utilization; intelligent agricultural machinery; Intelligent agricultural machinery; Morse decomposition; Motion planning; Path planning method; Path-planning algorithm; Seed
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 The advancement of society and technology has promoted the development of modern agri-culture. It has become a trend to replace traditional manpower with intelligent agricultural machinery that operates independently. As the core technology of intelligent agricultural machinery, complete coverage path planning technology has become more important. At present, the complete coverage path planning algorithms still suffer from problems such as sacrificing the coverage rate to obtain the minimum energy consumption, taking a long time to calculate the algorithm, and destroying crops across the covered region. In view of the above problems, an improved complete coverage path planning algorithms based on backtracking is proposed combined with the actual needs of intelligent agricultural machinery for planting seedlings to improve four aspects: repeated coverage, search efficiency, path planning, and sub-regional crossing. Firstly, the Morse decomposition method is used to divide a complex farmland region into simple sub-regions. Then an improved backtracking method based on a greedy algorithm is proposed in order to reduce the computational efficiency of the current region connection algorithms. The priority principle and the strategy of moving along the boundary are used to solve the problems of region crossing and sacrificing the coverage rate, thereby improving the performance of the current complete coverage path planning method. Compared with the traditional backtracking method, the experimental results show that the number of backtracking points is decreased by about 70% and the occurrence of crossing sub-regions has been significantly reduced. This proposed method can improve the coverage and operating efficiency of intelligent agricultural machinery operations and provide technical support for agricultural operations such as sowing, tillage, and harvesting, thus improving the quality and efficiency of agricultural production. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.