Research on Route Planning of Plant Protection UAV Based on Area Modular Division

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly emerged as a new technology in the fields of plant protection and pest controlling. In order to optimize the comprehensive performance of plant protection drones in large-area operation, a new regional module route planning method based on improved cattle farming reciprocating was proposed. Firstly, according to the characteristics of work area, the concept and method of regional module division were given. Secondly, the route planning problem was transformed into the operation module division problem, and the sub-area module and route planning with the least operation time and energy consumption were obtained. The simulation results showed our proposed method for regional modularized route planning reduced the number of operations of plant protection drones in large-area operation areas effectively, and shortened the total flight distance of plant protection drones. Compared with the traditional cattle-farming reciprocating route planning, the work time of route planning and operating electricity consumption were shortened about 16.7% and 10.8% respectively, demonstrating our proposed method was feasible. Additionally, this study can provide a reference for multi-plant protection drone route planning.