A Method for Planning the Routes of Harvesting Equipment using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The widespread distribution of precision farming systems necessitates improvements in the methods for the control of unmanned harvesting equipment (UHE). While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide an effective solution to this problem, there are many challenges in the implementation of technology. This paper considers the problem of identifying optimal routes of UHE movement as a multicriteria evaluation problem, which can be solved by a nonlinear scheme of compromises. The proposed method uses machine learning algorithms and statistical processing of the spectral characteristics obtained from UAV digital images. Developed method minimizes the resources needed for a harvesting campaign and reduces the costs of fuel consumption.