Optimal pest management by networked unmanned cropdusters in precision agriculture: A cyber-physical system approach

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) are expected to see the largest application within the agricultural market. These versatile platforms have shown promise ushering in the next wave of precision agriculture. While remote sensing applications have been well documented and developed, there remains significant advances left to be made in improving the use of UASs for precision application of pesticides. Although the current mode of aerial spraying or application of pesticides within the U.S. is done using full-sized aircraft, future implementations for autonomous crop dusting are likely to utilize small unmanned aircraft systems (SUASs) due to their much lower cost and ease of use. However, these smaller platforms have limited payload capacities, thus the development of cooperative swarms of SUASs is necessary. In this paper, a swarm of cooperative SUASs are utilized within a cyber-physical system framework to optimize the use of pesticides with precision spraying. Through the use of Centroid Voronoi Tessellation, the swarm makes the most efficient use of pesticides to attack an invasive pathogen. Simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed method.