field-coverage 0.1.0

Pathfinding for autonomous robots

Louis Cutteridge FYP: Coverage Path Planning for Agricultural Fields

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Abstract

Coverage path planning addresses the problem of finding a route that traverses every point within an environment. In applications such as agricultural seeding, coverage is destructive; subsequent passes to the same point undo the result of the first, making revisits undesirable. I formalise this as an optimisation problem: find a path that covers every cell in the grid while minimising the total number of revisits and turns. I present a systematic evaluation of my algorithm and evaluate its performance. This is followed by the creation of a web-app (AuTo-mato) which generates coverage paths for agricultural fields in the UK.

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Key Contributions

• Formalising CPP as a GTSP problem
• Rigorously proving the algorithm for complete coverage
• Solving the optimisation problem
• Creating the AuTo-mato web-app, which uses the algorithm as a backend

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Repository Structure

Directory	Contents
docs/	Diagrams and documentation assets
field_coverage/	Backend
field_coverage_ui/	Frontend
results/	Experiments, CSV files, and graphs
data/	GeoJSON files

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Setup

Note, this docker image has not been tested on a non arm CPU. Results and setup may differ.

1. Docker Container

Build the image from the root of field_coverage/:

docker build -f decomp/dockerfile -t fields2cover-api:v3 --platform linux/arm64 .

Run the container:

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 --platform linux/arm64 fields2cover-api:v3

2. Install Dependencies

Install uv, then:

uv pip install -e .

If this does not download field_coverage as well:

uv pip install field_coverage

3. Start the Backend

From the root of field_coverage/:

uvicorn coverage_api:app --reload --port 8000

4. Start the Frontend

From the root of field_coverage_ui/:

npm run dev

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Running Tests

pytest

To view the coverage report, open the following in your browser:

file:///<path-to-repo>/htmlcov/index.html

Architecture

The entire OOP architecture of the project:

Flowcharts

ACO

Flowchart for parallel ACO:

SA

Flowchart for SA:

Pipeline

High level pipeline of field_coverage:

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