Optimizing agricultural coverage path to minimize soil compaction

The Coverage Path Planning (CPP) problem is the optimization problem of finding the best path that covers a complete area. In agriculture, the coverage path defines the path that the tractor follows, which is directly related with soil compaction. Despite the consequences of soil compaction, using the disturbed soil as a cost function for the CPP problem has been little explored. This paper compares three methods to compute the disturbed soil for wheeled and caterpillar tracked vehicles. The methods are tested on simulation and compared visually on a real field. The experiments show that the presented methods can compute the disturbed soil area on a 3 km path accurately in less than 12 s