Coverage Path Planning in Precision Agriculture: Algorithms, Applications, and Key Benefits

Coverage path planning (CPP) is the task of computing an optimal path within a region to completely scan or survey an area of interest using one or multiple mobile robots. Robots equipped with sensors and cameras can collect vast amounts of data on crop health, soil conditions, and weather patterns. Advanced analytics can then be applied to this data to make informed decisions, improving overall farm management. In this paper, we will demonstrate one approach to find the optimal coverage path of an agricultural field using a single robot, and one using multiple robots. For the single robot, we used a wavefront coverage algorithm that generates a sequence of locations that the robot needs to follow. For the multi-robot approach, the proposed approach consists of two steps: dividing the agricultural field into convex polygonal areas to optimally distribute them among the robots, and generating an optimal coverage path to ensure minimum coverage time for each of the polygonal areas.