From 2D to 3D terrain-following area coverage path planning
This addresses the need for efficient 3D path planning in agricultural applications, but it is incremental as it extends 2D methods to 3D with added complexities.
The paper tackles the problem of generating 3D terrain-following area coverage paths for machinery, presenting an algorithm that produces adjacent paths spaced by the working width and floating at a specific height above terrain, validated with real-world agricultural data.
An algorithm for 3D terrain-following area coverage path planning is presented. Multiple adjacent paths are generated that are (i) locally apart from each other by a distance equal to the working width of a machinery, while (ii) simultaneously floating at a projection distance equal to a specific working height above the terrain. The complexities of the algorithm in comparison to its 2D equivalent are highlighted. These include uniformly spaced elevation data generation using an Inverse Distance Weighting-approach and a local search. Area coverage path planning results for real-world 3D data within an agricultural context are presented to validate the algorithm.