This use case will combine multiple types of ground micro-climate/soil/leaf information stations, agri-drones, semi-autonomous mobile robots and wearable devices to reduce spraying and support organic olives harvesting.
Smart Farming Use Case & Living Lab
Use case Applications
- Aerial Precision Bio-Spraying. To protect the olive trees from olive fruit fly, while preserving the organic certification, there is a need for frequent spraying of natural mineral ingredients (i.e. Zeolite or Kaolin). We plan to combine micro-clima data and real-time video analysis of the crop from visual and multi-spectral cameras located on semi-autonomous drones flying over the olive trees plantation and identifying in real-time where bio-spraying is needed. By porting NEMO on SynField and agri-drones, we will validate the execution of real-time CF-DRL based video analysis on the drone based on semi-trained ML models and utilizing Transfer Learning, or at the edge based on FML, applying migration of the video analysis task, and dynamically adjust drones’ trajectory to introduce optimal, precision aerial bio-spraying only in areas of interest.
- Terrestrial Precision Bio-Spraying. Organic insecticides preserve the bio certification, but require frequent spraying, while in larger quantities increase the cost and may also affect the bees. In NEMO, we plan to use semi-autonomous robots equipped with cameras to locate weeds and enable optimal precision spraying with organic insecticide (pyrethrin). Using NEMO CF-DRL, the robots will be able to, while avoiding workers (safety) and trees (operating reasons). In parallel, wearable devices (smart phones) will collect location and activity data.
The use case will be hosted at a commercial Olives plantation in the region of Peloponnese. The pilot has a size of 200ha and belongs to Agia Sofia Estate, a pioneering organic Olive oil cooperative. Technologies already in place include an anti-frost system, a hail protection system, automated irrigation system by SYN, while SynField™ system (AIoT and cloud platform) has already been installed in the field. The NB-IoT/5G RAN, Edge and Cloud infrastructure will be provided by OTE, featuring Open Air Interface and commercial platforms.
NEMO as Smart Farming and Precision Agriculture IoT/Edge/Cloud Differentiator
- Validate NEMO on heterogenous and fast-moving AIoT (i.e. drones, agri-robots, smart phones) with various OS (i.e. ROS, Android) and physical interfaces such as NBIoT, LoRa and 5G RAN.
- Make intelligent decisions (i.e. trajectory modification/optimization, precision bio-spraying, trees/humans collision avoidance) through real-time positioning and CF-DRL functions hosted on the IoT or at the edge.
- Create extensive set of Data Sets (micro-clima, visual and multi-spectral images/video, irrigation and bio-spraying schema) to be shared as FAIR data via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)
- Validate NEMO user acceptance from a farmer viewpoint evaluating bio-spraying efficiency, simplicity and cost
1SynField is Synelixis precision agriculture solution already installed in Greece, Serbia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Finland, Denmark and India.