UAVs for Sustainable Palm Oil Production: An Ant Colony Approach to Efficient Path Planning

The production of palm oil on a commercial scale is labour intensive with many of its processes handled by humans. In some countries, there can be as many as 500,000 plantation workers in the palm oil sector involved in labour intensive work in large plantations. However, such dependence on humans for low skill manual work has led to many problems. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been seen as a possible alternative to support some of these processes that require low skills in the palm oil industry. However, the flying time of the UAVs is finite and hence it is important to maximize the number of palm trees that it can service. In this paper, an Ant Colony System (ACS) with a novel path constructor was used to identify good flight paths for UAVs in large palm oil plantations to help improve the efficiency for some of the agricultural activities. Good results were obtained for various data sets especially when compared with the standard ACS as well as those by the human experts.