Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Collaboration for Weed Control in Field Crops

Precision.ai is building solutions to minimize chemical consumption while maintaining weed control through Intelligent UAV based application. Precision.ai has working survey drones that can fly a field, capture images and use AI to map weeds to be sprayed later. Precision.ai also has “See & spray” drones that can fly a field, identify weeds and spray them. We now need to scale our capabilities through drone swarming. The required speed and coverage will require an autonomous and collaborative swarm of drones (or a combination of more capable drones and/or more efficient field coverage). This includes smart autonomous adaptive path planning for the multi-UAV swarm. This includes improved (optimized) field coverage. We need growers to be able to configure missions to optimize coverage, minimize chemical use, minimize mission time and optimize weed suppression based on their crop and field scenarios. We expect field size to mean that drones will need to autonomously reload and recharge at points in their missions. This will likely require other agents in the swarm to adapt their flight / spray paths for complete coverage.

Faculty Supervisor:

Malek Mouhob

Student:

Ali Moltajaei Farid

Partner:

Precision.ai

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Regina