Abstract
This paper describes the design, construction and validation of a mobile sensory platform for greenhouse monitoring. The complete system consists of a sensory system on board a small quadrotor (i.e., a four rotor mini-UAV). The goals of this system include taking measures of temperature, humidity, luminosity and CO2 concentration and plotting maps of these variables. These features could potentially allow for climate control, crop monitoring or failure detection (e.g., a break in a plastic cover). The sensors have been selected by considering the climate and plant growth models and the requirements for their integration onboard the quadrotor. The sensors layout and placement have been determined through a study of quadrotor aerodynamics and the influence of the airflows from its rotors. All components of the system have been developed, integrated and tested through a set of field experiments in a real greenhouse. The primary contributions of this paper are the validation of the quadrotor as a platform for measuring environmental variables and the determination of the optimal location of sensors on a quadrotor.
Highlights
Greenhouse farming is one of the most suitable areas for employing automation, robotic and computing technologies
In order to validate the developments made in the laboratory, a series of field experiments was carried out in a greenhouse located in Almeria (Andalucia, Spain), an area with massive use of greenhouse farming
The quadrotor followed a pre-planned path to avoid collisions with obstacles and obtained its location using visual odometry and measurements from its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)
Summary
Greenhouse farming is one of the most suitable areas for employing automation, robotic and computing technologies. Many greenhouses have climate control systems, which are usually composed of temperature and humidity sensors as well as irrigation, ventilation, and heating systems These technologies offer a wide range of possibilities including climate control, production monitoring or detection of infestations or weeds. The emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has initiated a revolution in these types of projects: WSNs provide flexibility (i.e., the network can be constructed without a fixed architecture), modularity (i.e., the network can incorporate new devices) and fault tolerance (i.e., the network can work with failures in some motes) with low power consumption (i.e., the motes usually have a sleep mode) to facilities [1] These networks have been used in many applications in fields related to agriculture and food [2,3]: environmental monitoring [4] (e.g., climate monitoring and fire detection), precision agriculture [5] (e.g., rationalization of chemical products and optimization of irrigation) or the food industry (e.g., quality control and product traceability)
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