A coverage planner for multi-robot systems in agriculture

Driving heavy tractors and agricultural machinery on soil for growing plants causes more permanent damage to the soil than was previously believed. Compacting the soil severely deteriorates soil fertility leading to poor crop yields and increased population from agricultural lands. In addition, compacted soils require many years of expensive treatment to recover their fertility. Soil compaction problem can be solved by replacing heavy tractors and machinery with a number of smaller and lighter vehicles that is capable of treating crop fields as well as heavy ones without compacting the soil. However, this scenario is impractical because of the high operating cost to secure a human operator/driver for each vehicle. A practical solution is to replace heavy tractors and machinery by a set of autonomous vehicles that require minimum or no human intervention. In this paper, the technology required to enable a single farmer to supervise and operate a team of automated vehicles, is proposed. This will include the development of a Mission Control Center and Intelligent Coverage Path Planning algorithms to enable team/swarm of autonomous vehicles to communicate and cooperate and solve a range of agricultural tasks in a safe and efficient way.