UAV aided fruit picking strategy for emergency harvesting

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a new type of emergency situation which features the long lasting nature and rigid restrictions in human activities. In agriculture, the pandemic has severely restricted the fruit harvesting activities due to their labour-intensive characteristic. Hence, in this paper, we proposes an unmanned aerial vehicles aided approach to speed up the fruit picking process in both normal and emergency situations (such as the current COVID-19 pandemic or extreme weather conditions). The fruit picking process is modelled as an assignment problem and the time cost in both travelling and picking actions is taken into consideration. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm remarkably improves the efficiency of the fruit picking process.