IDeA: IoT-Based Autonomous Aerial Demarcation and Path Planning for Precision Agriculture with UAVs

In this work, we propose an autonomous and onboard image-based agricultural land demarcation and path-planning system-IDeA (IoT-Based Autonomous Aerial Demarcation and Path Planning for Precision Agriculture) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-using our advanced UAV-based aerial IoT platform. Our work successfully addresses the problem of onboard and autonomous path planning-which conventional UAV-based systems are not capable of-during stand-alone operations and without preloaded Global Positioning SYstem (GPS) markers for flight path waypoints. Our aerial system visually identifies non-electronically and singularly tagged agricultural plots and assesses the enclosing boundaries of the identified plot. Subsequently, an onboard path planning module autonomously generates GPS waypoints for traversing the identified plot with minimal overlaps and maximal coverage. Our proposed system exhibits an area coverage efficiency of 95.39%, performs pixel-to-GPS coordinate conversion with an accuracy of 90.35%, and has high agricultural potential in applications such as surveying crop health conditions and spraying pesticide/ herbicides. The proposed system has massive applications in scenarios requiring aerial detection, demarcation, geographical tagging, and coverage of an area.