LoRa and Cloud-Based Multi-robot Pesticide Spraying for Precision Agriculture

With the increase in global population and demand for food, there is a need to transit from our traditional agricultural practices towards modern agricultural techniques using sensors, robots, cloud computing etc, which on a broader view is known as Agriculture 4.0. Using chemical pesticides is a very important process in agricultural activity but it is not only dangerous but it also has hazardous effect on humans who come in its regular contact. In this paper, we propose a methodology using multiple robots for spraying pesticides over an agricultural field using cloud computing. Long Range (LoRa) Network is used because of its long range, low power and penetration capabilities. Webots, an open-source simulator that supports multi-robot programming, is used for the simulations. Using four robots instead of one caused a time reduction of nearly 72%. The coverage obtained ranges from 87.6% to 96.85%.