Excellence in Research: Developing a Robust, Distributed, and Automated Sensing and Control System for Smart Agriculture

To accommodate rapidly growing food demands and increase the quality and quantity of agricultural production, it is necessary to improve farming management practices and technological developments in agricultural fields. This project will synergize expertise in Control, Robotics, Remote Sensing, and Agricultural Engineering to develop new approaches for automated monitoring of smart agricultural systems as an important class of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This award supports fundamental research to develop innovative techniques for smart agricultural systems by employing a distributed airborne networked sensor system for a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to survey a farm. Unlike traditional crop management methods that use ground operators or vehicles for monitoring farms, the proposed approach for airborne monitoring of agricultural fields minimizes deployment of on-the-ground operations, avoiding damaging crops on healthy parts of the farms.

The objectives of this project are (1) developing a distributed airborne monitoring system for surveying farms to detect possible zones of crop damage or nutrition deficiency, and (2) implementing and demonstrating the developed methods for coordination of UAVs for agricultural applications over the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) farm. To achieve these objectives, an optimal planning technique will be developed for coordinating UAVs while incorporating their physical constraints and safety considerations, ensuring a complete survey of the farm and respecting sensing requirements. An automated decision-making technique will be developed to process the collected imagery information and detect the problem spots in the farm and their size and severity. Integrated with the proposed research is an innovative education and outreach plan that will engage a diverse range of students, farmers, and local community members in STEM-relevant activities and agritechnological aspects of this project to increase public awareness on using new technologies for further development of precision agriculture.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.