An important area in precision agriculture is related to the efficient use of chemicals applied onto fields. Efforts have been made to diminish their use, aiming at cost reduction and fewer chemical residues in the final agricultural products. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents itself as an attractive and cheap alternative for spraying pesticides and fertilizers compared to conventional mass spraying performed by ordinary manned aircraft. Besides being cheaper than manned aircraft, small UAVs are capable of performing fine-grained instead of the mass spraying. Observing this improved method, this paper reports the design of an embedded real-time UAV spraying control system supported by onboard image processing. The proposal uses a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) algorithm to detect the exact locations in which the chemicals are needed. Using this information, the automated spraying control system performs punctual applications while the UAV navigates over the crops. The system architecture is designed to run on low-cost hardware, which demands an efficient NDVI algorithm. The experiments were conducted using Raspberry Pi 3 as the embedded hardware. First, experiments in a laboratory were conducted in which the algorithm was proved to be correct and efficient. Then, field tests in real conditions were conducted for validation purposes. These validation tests were performed in an agronomic research station with the Raspberry hardware integrated into a UAV flying over a field of crops. The average CPU usage was about 20% while memory consumption was about 70 MB for high definition images, with 4% CPU usage and 20.3 MB RAM being observed for low-resolution images. The average current measured to execute the proposed algorithm was 0.11 A. The obtained results prove that the proposed solution is efficient in terms of processing and energy consumption when used in embedded hardware and provides measurements which are coherent with the commercial GreenSeeker equipment.
Young, older, frail, and disabled individuals can require some form of monitoring or assistance, mainly when critical situations occur, such as falling and wandering. Healthcare facilities are increasingly interested in e-health systems that can detect and respond to emergencies on time. Indoor localization is an essential function in such e-health systems, and it typically relies on wireless sensor networks (WSN) composed of fixed and mobile nodes. Nodes in the network can become permanently or momentarily unavailable due to, for example, power failures, being out of range, and wrong placement. Consequently, unavailable sensors not providing data can compromise the system’s overall function. One approach to overcome the problem is to employ virtual sensors as replacements for unavailable sensors and generate synthetic but still realistic data. This paper investigated the viability of modelling and artificially reproducing the path of a monitored target tracked by a WSN with unavailable sensors. Particularly, the case with just a single sensor was explored. Based on the coordinates of the last measured positions by the unavailable node, a neural network was trained with 4 min of not very linear data to reproduce the behavior of a sensor that become unavailable for about 2 min. Such an approach provided reasonably successful results, especially for areas close to the room’s entrances and exits, which are critical for the security monitoring of patients in healthcare facilities.
Recent research and developments in Cloud Robotics (CR) require appropriate knowledge representation to ensure interoperable data, information, and knowledge sharing within cloud infrastructures. As an important branch of the Internet of Things (IoT), these demands to advance it forward motivates academic and industrial sectors to invest on it. The IEEE 'Ontologies for Robotics and Automation' Working Group (ORA WG) has been developing standard ontologies for different robotic domains, including industrial and autonomous robots. The use of such robotic standards has the potential to benefit the Cloud Robotic Community (CRC) as well, supporting the provision of ubiquitous intelligent services by the CR-based systems. This paper explores this potential by developing an ontological approach for effective information sharing in cloud robotics scenarios. It presents an extension to the existing ontological standards to cater for the CR domain. The use of the new ontological elements is illustrated through its use in a couple of CR case studies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work ever that implements an ontology comprising concepts and axioms applicable to the CR domain.
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