Fields2Cover

Robust and efficient coverage paths for autonomous agricultural vehicles

The coverage path planning problem (CPP) aims to create a path to cover an area with one or several vehicles. CPP has many application as cleaning robots, surveillance, de-mining or agriculture. Each of the application has its own requirements. For example, in cleaning robots environment is usually unknown and the objective is improve the probability of cover the area. On the other hand, CPP in agriculture knows the area to cover, but the coverage has to be complete.

Fields2Cover library provides several algorithms to plan the coverage path on convex fields:

Although the development of this project is focused on offline planning of agricultural vehicles, the library accepts pull requests from other types of coverage planners.

Why?

There are many CPP papers out there, but almost no code about their implementation. Due to this, research about this topic is slow as you need to implement every algorithm you want to compare with.

Fields2Cover provides a flexible structure and several algorithms to compare with, so any developer can research about this topic easily.

Installation

The Fields2Cover package has only been tested on Ubuntu 20.04. If you are able to run it in other operative systems, open an issue/PR and it will be added to this guide

Requirements on Linux

Some packages are needed before compiling the package:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends build-essential ca-certificates cmake \
     doxygen g++ git libeigen3-dev libgdal-dev libpython3-dev python3 python3-pip \
     python3-matplotlib lcov libgtest-dev
python -m pip install gcovr

Compilation

First, clone this repository. Then, from the main folder of the project:

cd build;
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..;
make -j$(nproc);
sudo make install;

Add it to your projects

To add Fields2Cover into your CMakeLists.txt, it is as easy as:

find_package(Fields2Cover REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(<<<your_package>>> Fields2Cover)

Compilation with python interface

As without the interface, clone this repository. Then, from the main folder of the project:

cd build;
cmake -DBUILD_PYTHON=ON ..;
make -j$(nproc);
sudo make install;

To test if the compilation and installation of the python interface is correct, run on python:

import fields2cover

Contribute

If you find any issue/bug/proposal, open an issue and we will try to solve/discuss it.

Pull requests are more than welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

Fields2Cover project is under BSD-3 license.

TODO

Create SWIG interface with Lua/R
Support Route planners with metaheuristics
Support non-convex fields
Consider the start and end point of the vehicle
...

Credits and more info

This library is only possible thanks to GDAL who provides the basic types of this library. Other great libraries that made Fields2Cover possible are hbanzhaf/steering_functions, nlohmann/json, leethomason/tinyxml2, ttk592/spline and lava/matplotlib-cpp

This code repository is part of the project Fields2Cover which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

jfulem/Fields2Cover