Framework for Biological Control with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

• Bruno S. da Silva UFPel
• Tauã M. Cabreira IF Sul-rio-grandense
• Bruno J. O. De Souza PUC-Rio
• Nicholas R. Matias BirdView Drone Bio Control
• Ricardo A. O. Machado BirdView Drone Bio Control
• Lucio André C. Jorge EMBRAPA
• Paulo Roberto Ferreira UFPel

Resumo

Agricultural pests and diseases can cause financial losses on the scale of millions per year and threaten food security. Biological control (BC) is a natural phenomenon to mitigate a particular population of pests, making them less abundant and harmful. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a platform to support BC is promising due to the low cost, high efficiency, and wide application range. UAV coverage path planning is necessary to an effective dispersion over an agricultural area. However, in many cases, this planning is carried out empirically by pilots in the field. It is necessary to address several need to be taken into account in the search for automation and optimization of coverage route planning for BC using UAVs, such as: identifying the main characteristics of the coverage area, looking for suitable landing and take-off points, determining the distance between the parallel line of the coverage trajectory due to the biological agent in use, setting the flight altitude, safely returning to the base, and generating ready-to-fly route coverage files. This article presents a framework and implementation containing a coverage path planning algorithm for automating biological control routes considering essential aspects of a real-world scenario. Actual flights using the framework implementation show the efficiency and reliability of the proposed approach.

Palavras-chave: Automation, Sociology, Writing, Autonomous aerial vehicles, Planning, Trajectory, Biological information theory, Biological control, UAV, Route planning, Coverage Path Planning