Path Planning for ground robots in agriculture: a short review

The world’s population is estimated to reach nine billion people by the year 2050, which indicates that agricultural productivity must increase sustainably. The mechanisation and automatisation of agricultural tasks is an essential step to face population growth. Ground robots have been developed along the last decade for several agricultural applications, being, the autonomous and safe navigation one of the hardest challenge in this development. Moving autonomously, a mobile platform involves different tasks, such as localisation, mapping, motion control, and path planning, a crucial step for autonomous operations. This article performs a survey of different applications for path planning techniques applied to various agricultural contexts. This paper analyses different agricultural applications and details about the employed path planning method. The conclusion indicates that path planning has been successfully applied to agrarian robots for field coverage and point-to-point navigation, being that coverage path planning is slightly more advanced in this field.