Fields2Cover: An open-source coverage path planning library for unmanned agricultural vehicles

TL;DR

Fields2Cover is an open-source library that unifies and benchmarks coverage path planning algorithms for agricultural vehicles, supporting diverse applications and facilitating development and comparison of new techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, extensible framework for coverage path planning in agriculture, including benchmarking tools and ROS integration, filling a gap in open-source solutions.

Findings

Demonstrated planning with 8 algorithms and 7 objectives in simulation and field tests.

Provides a flexible platform for developing and comparing coverage path planning methods.

Supports various vehicle types and applications in agricultural settings.

Abstract

This paper describes Fields2Cover, a novel open source library for coverage path planning (CPP) for agricultural vehicles. While there are several CPP solutions nowadays, there have been limited efforts to unify them into an open source library and provide benchmarking tools to compare their performance. Fields2Cover provides a framework for planning coverage paths, developing novel techniques, and benchmarking state-of-the-art algorithms. The library features a modular and extensible architecture that supports various vehicles and can be used for a variety of applications, including farms. Its core modules are: a headland generator, a swath generator, a route planner and a path planner. An interface to the Robot Operating System (ROS) is also supplied as an add-on. In this paper, the functionalities of the library for planning a coverage path in agriculture are demonstrated using 8 state-of-the-art methods and 7 objective functions in simulation and field experiments.