MULTI-AGENT PATH PLANNING OF ROBOTIC SWARMS IN AGRICULTURAL FIELDS

Abstract. Collaborative swarms of robots/UAVs constitute a promising solution for precision agriculture and for automatizing agricultural processes. Since agricultural fields have complex topologies and different constraints, the problem of optimized path routing of these swarms is important to be tackled. Hence, this paper deals with the problem of optimizing path routing for a swarm of ground robots and UAVs in different popular topologies of agricultural fields. Four algorithms (Nearest Neighbour based on K-means clustering, Christofides, Ant Colony Optimisation and Bellman-Held-Karp) are applied on various farm types commonly found around Europe. The results indicate that the problem of path planning and the corresponding algorithm to use, are sensitive to the field topology and to the number of agents in the swarm.