Student information

MSc thesis topic: Coverage path planning for autonomous field operations

Labour scarcity and soil compaction are important problems in modern agriculture. Agricultural machines tend to become larger and heavier which may severely damage soil structure, particularly if fields are worked under wet soil conditions. Two potential ways to reduce soil compaction are (1) controlled traffic farming (CTF) where vehicles can only drive on pre-planned tracks, and (2) using smaller and lighter autonomous vehicles. Either of the solutions requires carefully planned paths over the field while they will also benefit from optimizing routes over those paths, particularly when taking into account the vehicle’s capacity constraints.

Relevance to research/projects at GRS or other groups

This project is related to the project “Field2Cover” and the open source software library with the same name (https://fields2cover.github.io/index.html). The thesis topic can focus on software engineering aspects and/or application aspects of the work. Below you can find three examples of possible research objectives. There are more options, which can be discussed with the supervisor.

Objectives and Research questions

  • Optimize the order of multiple headlands coverage when there are headlands around in-field obstacles.
  • Include support for capacitated vehicle problems, focusing on harvesting with uncertain yield.
  • Path planning avoiding small obstacles in the headlands

Requirements

  • Strong analytical skills
  • Knowledge of Python scripting is a must
  • Preferably some agronomic knowledge

Literature and information

Theme(s): Modelling & visualisation