Intelligent and sustainable management of the water needs of crops through aerial and ground sensors

The project aims to create a system for intelligent and sustainable water management in agriculture. It provides for the use of appropriate technological infrastructures able to extract information in real-time from the monitored land in order to manage it optimally. These infrastructures include various types of underground sensors able to measure, in real-time, the metrics of interest (fiber-optic sensors for humidity detection). Moreover, they include UAV aircraft, such as drones or small aircraft, equipped with suitable sensors (e.g. thermal or multispectral cameras) for the capture of aerial images that allow mapping the considered agricultural land to detect the state of the crops in the time.

For example, the relevant information is:

• the land characteristics,
• the microclimate and its humidity levels,
• the possible threats to the health of crops.

The relevant information, extracted from the sensors, are stored and analyzed through the use of ad-hoc data mining algorithms to extract metrics to identify, in real-time:

• the most suitable irrigation techniques for the soils analyzed;
• the state of irrigation of the land and the irrigation requirements;
• other maintenance tasks related to the condition of the monitored.

The advantages deriving from the implementation of this irrigation management system are relevant if we consider that on the base of the climate change, the farms have to balance the external factors with the plantation process.