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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Bird damage to fruit crops causes significant monetary losses to farmers annually. The
application of traditional bird repelling methods such as bird cannons and tree netting become
inefficient in the long run, requiring high maintenance and reducing mobility. Due to their versatility,
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be beneficial to solve this problem. However, due to their low
battery capacity that equals low flight duration, it is necessary to evolve path planning optimization.
A novel path planning optimization algorithm of UAVs based on Particle Swarm Optimization
(PSO) is presented in this paper. This path planning optimization algorithm aims to manage the
drone’s distance and flight time, applying optimization and randomness techniques to overcome
the disadvantages of the traditional systems. The proposed algorithm’s performance was tested in
three study cases: two of them in simulation to test the variation of each parameter and one in the
field to test the influence on battery management and height influence. All cases were tested in the
three possible situations: same incidence rate, different rates, and different rates with no bird damage
to fruit crops. The field tests were also essential to understand the algorithm’s behavior of the path
planning algorithm in the UAV, showing that there is less efficiency with fewer points of interest, but
this does not correlate with the flight time. In addition, there is no association between the maximum
horizontal speed and the flight time, which means that the function to calculate the total distance for
path planning needs to be adjusted. Thus, the proposed algorithm presents promising results with
an outstanding reduced average error in the total distance for the path planning obtained and low
execution time, being suited for this and other applications.
Description
Keywords
Bird Damage to Fruit Crops Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Path Planning Meta-Heuristic Path Planning Optimization Algorithm