Development and Preliminary Tests of a Crop Monitoring Mobile Lab Based on a Combined use of Optical Sensors

Abstract

Background: Technology is constantly evolving with respect to production agriculture. Precision farming technologies have been increasingly recognized for their potential ability for improving agricultural productivity, reducing production cost, and minimizing damage to the environment. Methods: The combined use of different sensors and the following analysis of the recorded data allowed to define an efficient technique for crop monitoring. Results: We obtained the volume reconstruction of several plants and the NDVI mapping by exploiting the proposed technique. Conclusion: Crop monitoring and yield forecasting play a major role in the agricultural context. Future work will be devoted to develop and use a customized index structure to increase the efficiency and to integrate in our knowledge base some geo referential data.

Blooming charge assessment in apple orchards for automatic thinning activities

“…In order to find new solutions for automating crop-monitoring activities, several types of sensors (including LiDAR and OptRx™) have been tested by several authors. The LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor is able to assess the canopy volume via the emission of a laser beam (Bietresato et al, 2016;, while active light sensors are able to provides information about the status of the crop (Mazzetto et al, 2010;D'Auria et al, 2016). Active optical sensors, such as OptRx™, are able to generate a light at three known wavelengths (670, 730, and 780 nm) and record the light reflected by the target.…”