| AI drones to help farmers optimize vegetable yields
A visual overview of the system to capture and analyze image data about crops, which then informs a model to help farmers know the best time to harvest their fields.
AI drones to help farmers optimize vegetable yields
by Staff Writers
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Oct 04, 2023
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For reasons of food security and economic incentive, farmers continuously seek to maximize their marketable crop yields. As plants grow inconsistently, at the time of harvesting, there will inevitably be variations in quality and size of individual crops. Finding the optimal time to harvest is therefore a priority for farmers.
A new approach making heavy use of drones and artificial intelligence demonstrably improves this estimation by carefully and accurately analyzing individual crops to assess their likely growth characteristics.
Some optimistic science fiction stories talk about a post-scarcity future, where human needs are catered for and hard labor is provided by machines. There are some ways in which this vision appears to predict some elements of current technological progress.
One such area is in agricultural research, where automation has been making an impact. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, have demonstrated a largely automated system to improve crop yields, which can benefit many and may help pave the way for future systems that could one day harvest crops directly.
"The idea is relatively simple, but the design, implementation and execution is extraordinarily complex," said Associate Professor Wei Guo from the Laboratory of Field Phenomics. "If farmers know the ideal time to harvest crop fields, they can reduce waste, which is good for them, for consumers and the environment. But optimum harvest times are not an easy thing to predict and ideally require detailed knowledge of each plant; such data would be cost and time prohibitive if people were employed to collect it. This is where the drones come in."
Guo has a background in both computer science and agricultural science, so is ideally suited to finding ways cutting-edge hardware and software could aid agriculture. He and his team have demonstrated that some low-cost drones with specialized software can image and analyze young plants - broccoli in the case of this study - and accurately predict their expected growth characteristics. The drones carry out the imaging process multiple times and do so without human interaction, meaning the system requires little in terms of labor costs.
"It might surprise some to know that by harvesting a field as little as a day before or after the optimal time could reduce the potential income of that field for the farmer by 3.7% to as much as 20.4%," said Guo.
"But with our system, drones identify and catalog every plant in the field, and their imaging data feeds a model that uses deep learning to produce easy-to-understand visual data for farmers. Given the current relative low costs of drones and computers, a commercial version of this system should be within reach to many farmers."
The main challenge the team faced was in the image analysis and deep learning aspects. Collecting the image data itself is relatively trivial, but given the way plants move in the wind and how the light changes with time and the seasons, the image data contains a lot of variation that machines often find hard to compensate for.
So, when training their system, the team had to invest a huge amount of time labeling various aspects of images the drones might see, in order to help the system learn to correctly identify what it was seeing. The vast data throughput was also challenging - image data was often of the order of trillions of pixels, tens of thousands of times larger than even a high-end smartphone camera.
"I'm inspired to find more ways that plant phenotyping (measuring of plant growth traits) can go from the
lab to the field in order to help solve the major problems we face," said Guo.
Research Report:Drone-Based Harvest Data Prediction Can Reduce On-Farm Food Loss and Improve Farmer Income
Artificial Intelligence Summary
Defense Industry Analyst: 8/10 This article provides insight into the impact of automation on the agricultural industry, which is relevant from a defense industry perspective. Automation technology has the potential to improve crop yields, reducing waste and increasing efficiency. This could have a positive impact on food security, a key factor for military forces. In addition, the use of drones and AI technology is becoming more commonplace in the defense industry, and this article provides insight into the potential of these technologies. Stock Market Analyst: 9/10 From a stock market perspective, this article is highly relevant as it provides insight into the potential of automation technology in the agricultural industry. This could have a positive impact on farmers crop yields, reducing waste and increasing efficiency. This could lead to increased profitability for farmers, which could lead to increased stock prices and improved financial performance. General Industry Analyst: 8/10 From a general industry perspective, this article is relevant as it provides insight into the potential of drones and AI technology in the agricultural industry. Automation technology has the potential to improve crop yields, reducing waste and increasing efficiency. This could have a positive impact on food security and economic incentive, two key goals of the industry. Analyst Summary: This article discusses the potential of using drones and AI technology to increase crop yields and reduce waste in the agricultural industry. Such technology has the potential to improve food security and economic incentive, two key goals of the industry. From a defense industry perspective, this technology could have a positive impact on food security for military forces. From a stock market perspective, this could lead to increased profitability for farmers, which could lead to increased stock prices and improved financial performance. The use of drones and AI technology is becoming more commonplace in the defense industry, and this article provides insight into the potential of these technologies. Over the past 25 years, there has been an increased focus on automation technology in the agricultural industry. This article provides a valuable insight into the potential of such technology, and its potential to improve crop yields and food security. Investigative Question:- 1. What other applications can drones and AI technology have in the agricultural industry?
- 2. How can the use of drones and AI technology in the agricultural industry be improved?
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How can farmers effectively implement and use drones and AI technology to improve crop yields?4. What other industries could benefit from the use of drones and AI technology? 5. What are the potential risks and implications of using drones and AI technology in the agricultural industry?
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