Biodegradable Sensors for High Resolution Monitoring in Precision Agriculture
Challenge
In the past, farmers were walking through their crop fields randomly to monitor the crops when they felt it is needed in order to prevent diseases and increase the yield. This is fine in case of the small sized fields, but in case of the big ones, it’s not the easy way of doing.
Nowadays, it is still very important for modern farmers to continuously monitor in detail the health of their cultivations, especially in case of highly added value products such as grapes.
A detailed overview of the crop field can be obtained by a dense placement of sensors so that parameters like terrain moisture and temperature can be precisely measured. However, a lot of sensors means a lot of pollution.
Diatomic Support
The DIATOMIC project management model helped BISEM Consortium to both reach the goals and prepare and deliver the reports: no energy has been dissipated thanks to a very close contact with Coaches that continuously controlled and monitored the evolution of the experiment in the Design, Development and Market phase. The Bootcamp in Athens
and the Coimbra Sustainability Summit’s sessions have enriched and consolidated the solid support that Coaches provided to the BISEM experiment. The pandemic effects have been perfectly managed by the Project that promptly has put in actions all the monitoring and corrective initiatives necessary and useful to complete the Experiment with a success.
Solution
BISEM Consortium developed a new generation of biodegradable sensors that could be safely used by agronomists and farmers in order to get a clear and detailed view of the crop health on the fields. With the goal to offer our future clients a turn-key solution, we also developed a sensor placement robotic procedure with the use of drones. The BISEM Experiment drones are used for both sensor placement and sensor reading tasks. BISEM Sensors usually asleep and do not carry onboard any energy source that could imply even the smaller level of pollution for the environment: they are awaken and charged by an “electromagnetic whisper” produced by a dedicated reader Drone and answer to this whisper by transmitting the locally measured parameters. A fully automated Web based infrastructure (AGRIMAP.EU) processes data and provide the farmers with the results.