Integrated monitoring system and multivariable irrigation prediction using deep learning techniques for banana and avocado crops.
Details
Acronym: REGADIA
Reference: PLEC2022-009444
Partners: Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) Instituto Canario de Investigaciones Agrarias (ICIA), Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables (ITER).
Duration: 2022-2025
Budget: 490.734,80 €
Co-Financing: Call for Strategic Lines 2022. State Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research 2021-2023. Ministry of Science and Innovation. Project PLEC2022-009444 funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/ PRTR.
Overview of the project
The main objective of the REGADIA project is to contribute to the optimization of the use of water resources on farms by implementing an integrated crop monitoring system and forecasting multivariate irrigation needs based on soil moisture parameters, water supply, crop stage and climatic conditions.
A network of sensors will be deployed to measure soil moisture in different locations of banana and avocado plantations, the most water-intensive crops in the Canary Islands. A local communications system, self-sufficient in terms of energy thanks to the installation of photovoltaic cells, will be responsible for transmitting data in real time to an IoT server instance in the cloud where a common data repository will be generated.
The crop stage and water requirements of the plants will be measured using aerial data in multiple spectra in combination with satellite imagery from the Copernicus system. Low-altitude multispectral imagery will be collected by UAVs equipped with state-of-the-art sensors in the different bands of interest for the characterization of vegetation indices.
From the data collected by soil moisture sensors and multispectral images, and their combination with water input data and related meteorological variables, the consortium will work on the development of predictive deep learning models to forecast crop irrigation needs, adapted to the characteristics of each farm, considering soil composition and geographical and meteorological conditions.
Graphic of the system to be designed in the REGADIA project.
The REGADIA project (PLEC2022-009444), coordinated by ITER´s Robotics Unit, will last 36 months and is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency (10.13039/501100011033) and by the European Union in the framework of the EU Recovery Plan Next Generation EU and the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).
