Route planning for orchard operations

Orchard operations are considered a promising area for the implementation of robotic systems because of the inherent structured operational environment that arises from time-independent spatial tree configurations. In this paper, a route planning approach is developed and tested using a deterministic behaviour robot (named AMS - autonomous mechanisation system). The core of the planning method is the generation of routing plans for intra- and inter-row orchard operations, based on the adaptation of an optimal area coverage method developed for arable farming operations (B-patterns). Experiments have verified that operational efficiencies can be improved significantly compared with the conventional, non-optimised method of executing orchard operations. Specifically, the experimental results showed that the non-working time reduction ranged between 10.7% and 32.4% and that the reduction in the non-working distance ranged between 17.5% and 40.2% resulting to savings in the total travelled distance ranged between 2.2% and 6.4%.