Multi-Node Path Planning of Electric Tractor Based on Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm and Ant Colony Algorithm

Under the “Double Carbon” background, the development of green agricultural machinery is very fast. An important factor that determines the performance of electric farm machinery is the endurance capacity, which is directly related to the running path of farm machinery. The optimized driving path can reduce the operating loss and extend the mileage of agricultural machinery, then multi-node path planning helps to improve the working efficiency of electric tractors. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is often used to solve multi-node path planning problems. However, ACO has some problems, such as poor global search ability, few initial pheromones, poor convergence, and weak optimization ability, which is not conducive to obtaining the optimal path. This paper proposes a multi-node path planning algorithm based on Improved Whale Optimized ACO, named IWOA-ACO. The algorithm first introduces reverse learning strategy, nonlinear convergence factor, and adaptive inertia weight factor to improve the global and local convergence ability. Then, an appropriate evaluation function is designed to evaluate the solving process and obtain the best fitting parameters of ACO. Finally, the optimal objective function, fast convergence, and stable operation requirements are achieved through the best fitting parameters to obtain the global path optimization. The simulation results show that in flat environment, the length and energy consumption of IWOA-ACO planned path are the same as those of PSO-ACO, and are 0.61% less than those of WOA-ACO. In addition, in bump environment, the length and energy consumption of IWOA-ACO planned path are 1.91% and 4.32% less than those of PSO-ACO, and are 1.95% and 1.25% less than those of WOA-ACO. Therefore, it is helpful to improve the operating efficiency along with the endurance of electric tractors, which has practical application value.