Dynamic-Headland-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Ground-Based Plant Protection Operations in Irregular Fields Using DQN-SHADE

Fixed full-boundary headlands create redundant non-working space in irregular fields, while working direction and swath offset jointly affect coverage quality and inter-swath turning cost. This study proposes a dynamic-headland-aware coverage path planning framework that allocates headland space according to swath endpoints and turning demand and generates parallel working swaths and Bézier U-turns for each direction–offset candidate. Field-specific empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF)-midrank normalization converts turning distance, coverage error, and headland ratio into relative quality scores, and DQN-SHADE searches the resulting non-smooth discrete evaluation landscape. In geometric simulations on 24 actual field boundaries, DQN-SHADE achieved the lowest mean gap to the discrete reference optimum (0.0034) and the highest threshold success rate, SR5×10−3, of 80.83% among six stochastic optimizers under a common candidate-evaluation budget. Relative to fixed full-boundary headlands, dynamic headland allocation reduced the mean headland ratio from 13.30% to 7.52%, increased retained working area by 16,378.23 m2 per field, and maintained 98.16% mean coverage. The proposed framework improves field-space utilization while maintaining coverage quality and geometric feasibility under the evaluated simulation conditions.