Coverage path and sortie planning for an agricultural spraying drone

Krishi Udaan runs eight spraying drones. Each carries a 10 L tank, sprays a 4 m swath when flying at 2.5 m above the crop, and holds 10 L for about 6.5 minutes of spraying at the right flow. A battery lasts about 12 minutes with a full tank. Pilots plan missions by hand on a tablet, drawing back-and-forth lines across each field.

Hand planning causes three problems. Fields in Nashik are irregular, so the lines leave strips unsprayed near the edges or overlap by 30% or more. Pilots often run out of liquid mid-row and fly back to refill from an awkward point. And near farmhouses, trees and a 33 kV line that crosses some fields, pilots switch to manual flying, which is slow and tiring.

Krishi Udaan wants a planner that: - takes a field boundary and keep-out zones; - chooses the line heading that gives the fewest turns and least overlap; - keeps overlap between swaths at about 10%; - splits the path into sorties so each ends at a refill point with tank and battery margin; - exports a waypoint mission for ground control software.

All flying must follow DGCA drone rules and the government's standard operating procedure for pesticide spraying by drone. Your planner must keep a buffer from houses and power lines and stay below the height limit for the drone's category.

You will write the planner in Python with Shapely, check it on three field shapes, and fly the missions in ArduPilot SITL, the free software-in-the-loop simulator, to measure real flight time.

You need no drone. Done looks like a planner that covers at least 97% of the sprayable area with under 12% overlap, a sortie plan with refill points, SITL flight logs, and a report showing time and cost per acre against today's hand planning.