用强化学习让无人机高效搜寻农田中不均匀分布的作物,省电又省时。
A drone that learns to efficiently find non-uniformly distributed objects in agricultural fields: from simulation to the real world
- 用强化学习训练无人机,基于低质量先验知识规划最短路径
- 仿真中路径缩短57%,真实飞行中路径缩短38%,漏检率略升
- 适合农业中目标分布不均的任务,如杂草或果实检测
无人机在精准农业数据采集中前景广阔,但受电池容量限制。传统路径规划采用全区域覆盖,未必必要。本文提出一种基于强化学习的无人机路径规划器,旨在以最短飞行路径检测最多目标。该智能体利用高空全覆飞行获取的低质量先验知识作为引导。在仿真中建模了目标分布、无人机运动、田地几何、检测误差及不确定先验。结合飞行控制器与目标检测网络,可实时控制飞行方向、判断终止时机,并部署于真实无人机。通过六级真实度评估(从纯仿真到真实飞行),验证了仿真到现实的差距。仿真中路径比全覆盖规划缩短57%(召回率低13%),真实正射影像上路径缩短38%(召回率低21%)。真实飞行中两次试验分别发现73%和23%的目标,性能下降主要因先验知识质量。尽管以杂草检测为场景,该方法预期可推广至其他非均匀分布目标的农业任务,容忍一定漏检,但尚需进一步研究才能实际部署。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Drones are promising for data collection in precision agriculture but are limited by battery capacity. Drone paths are usually planned using full coverage planners, even though this is not always required. This paper presents a drone path planner trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to detect as many objects as possible with a minimal flight path length. The agent uses low-quality prior knowledge derived from a high-altitude full coverage flight as guidance. The agent was trained in simulation, modeling object distributions, drone movement, field geometry, detection errors, and uncertain prior knowledge. Combined with a flight controller and object-detection network, it controls flight direction, terminates flights, and can be deployed on a real drone. It was evaluated across six levels of realism, from pure simulation to real-world drone flights, to quantify the simulation-to-reality gap. The agent achieved a 57% shorter flight path than a full coverage planner in simulation (13% lower recall) and a 38% shorter flight path on real-world orthomosaic data (21% lower recall). In real-world drone flights, the agent found 73% and 23% of the objects in trials 1 and 2, respectively; the lower real-world performance was mainly attributed to prior knowledge quality. Although framed as a weed-detection task, the approach is expected to generalize to other agricultural tasks with non-uniformly distributed objects and tolerance to false negatives, though further research is needed before practical deployment.
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