Minimizing flight time and fuel consumption for airborne crop spraying

Abstract

Abstract: With the world’s growing population and increase in urbanization, the requirement for optimized agriculture has increased.  Agricultural operations such as crop spraying and water management require rigorous monitoring of crops in order to identify the correct time to spray and irrigate the crops.  Thus managing vast properties require an affordable spraying strategy.  Advancement in computer processing speed and algorithms has made it possible to devise such strategies to optimize several agricultural operations.  One of those operations is to spray crops with pesticides and monitor crops.  This requires an airborne vehicle which can monitor and spray crops efficiently.  Several optimization techniques have been used in recent years to optimize the path of the aerial vehicle due to limited fuel carrying capability of these vehicles as well as the increasing cost of fuel.  A comparative study has been made in this paper to analyze the performance of some of the leading techniques used to optimize agricultural operations in recent years.

Keywords: crop spraying, optimization, airborne vehicles, pesticides, artificial intelligence