A Three-Dimensional Coverage Path Planning Method for Robots for Farmland with Complex Hilly Terrain

Hilly terrain farmland has diverse landforms, small fields, and unevenness. Thus, realizing farmland operation mechanization and automation is a difficult problem and has become one of the current research directions to implement agricultural mechanization. Full-coverage path planning is the basis for realizing agricultural mechanization and intelligence, and traditional full-coverage path planning algorithms cannot solve the full-coverage and energy consumption optimization problem during the management of hilly farmland on three-dimensional terrain. In this paper, for the full-coverage path-planning problem of hilly terrain farmland, based on analyzing the terrain characteristics of hilly farmland and the energy consumption model of robots traveling on non-flat ground, we propose a region decomposition method oriented to special terrain and prioritize the coverage of special terrain areas. We introduce a cost function for robot movement and design a full-coverage path planning algorithm for hilly three-dimensional terrain. We set up a simulation environment to carry out simulation experiments. The experimental results show that this paper’s algorithm can complete full coverage tasks in hilly terrain farmland, and compared with other algorithms, it has obvious advantages in path length, total elevation difference, and other aspects, effectively reducing the energy consumption of the coverage task. This lays a research foundation for the realization of agricultural mechanization in hilly terrain farmland.