Low-Cost Wireless Sensing System for Precision Agriculture Applications in Orchards

Novel Technologies towards the Implementation and Exploitation of "Green" Wireless Agriculture Sensors

This manuscript presents the use of three novel technologies for the implementation of wireless green battery-less sensors that can be used in agriculture. The three technologies, namely, additive manufacturing, energy harvesting, and wireless power transfer from airborne transmitters carried from UAVs, are considered for smart agriculture applications, and their combined use is demonstrated in a case study experiment. Additive manufacturing is exploited for the implementation of both RFID-based sensors and passive sensors based on humidity-sensitive materials. A number of energy-harvesting systems at UHF and ISM frequencies are presented, which are in the position to power platforms of wireless sensors, including humidity and temperature IC sensors used as agriculture sensors. Finally, in order to provide wireless energy to the soil-based sensors with energy harvesting features, wireless power transfer (WPT) from UAV carried transmitters is utilized. The use of these technologies can facilitate the extensive use and exploitation of battery-less wireless sensors, which are environmentally friendly and, thus, "green". Additionally, it can potentially drive precision agriculture in the next era through the implementation of a vast network of wireless green sensors which can collect and communicate data to airborne readers so as to support, the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-based decision-making with data.

Reliable Control Applications with Wireless Communication Technologies: Application to Robotic Systems

The nature of wireless propagation may reduce the QoS of the applications, such that some packages can be delayed or lost. For this reason, the design of wireless control applications must be faced in a holistic way to avoid degrading the performance of the control algorithms. This paper is aimed at improving the reliability of wireless control applications in the event of communication degradation or temporary loss at the wireless links. Two controller levels are used: sophisticated algorithms providing better performance are executed in a central node, whereas local independent controllers, implemented as back-up controllers, are executed next to the process in case of QoS degradation. This work presents a reliable strategy for switching between central and local controllers avoiding that plants may become uncontrolled. For validation purposes, the presented approach was used to control a planar robot. A Fuzzy Logic control algorithm was implemented as a main controller at a high performance computing platform. A back-up controller was implemented on an edge device. This approach avoids the robot becoming uncontrolled in case of communication failure. Although a planar robot was chosen in this work, the presented approach may be extended to other processes. XBee 900 MHz communication technology was selected for control tasks, leaving the 2.4 GHz band for integration with cloud services. Several experiments are presented to analyze the behavior of the control application under different circumstances. The results proved that our approach allows the use of wireless communications, even in critical control applications.

Bridging the Gaps in Traceability Systems for Fresh Produce Supply Chains: Overview and Development of an Integrated IoT-Based System

Traceability, namely the ability to access information about a product and its movement across all stages of the supply chain, has been emerged as a key criterion of a product’s quality and safety. Managing fresh products, such as fruits and vegetables, is a particularly complicated task, since they are perishable with short shelf lives and are vulnerable to environmental conditions. This makes traceability of fresh produce very significant. The present study provides a brief overview of the relative literature on fresh produce traceability systems. It was concluded that the commercially available traceability systems usually neither cover the entire length of the supply chain nor rely on open and transparent interoperability standards. Therefore, a user-friendly open access traceability system is proposed for the development of an integrated solution for traceability and agro-logistics of fresh products, focusing on interoperability and data sharing. Various Internet of Things technologies are incorporated and connected to the web, while an android-based platform enables the monitoring of the quality of fruits and vegetables throughout the whole agri-food supply chain, starting from the field level to the consumer and back to the field. The applicability of the system, named AgroTRACE, is further extended to waste management, which constitutes an important aspect of a circular economy.