Boosting innovation and research in the agricultural sector is crucial if farmers are asked to produce more with less. Precision agriculture offers different solutions to assist farmers in improving efficiency and reducing labor costs while respecting the legal requirements. Precision spraying enables the treatment of only the plants that require it, with the right amount of products. Our research group has developed a solution based on a reconfigurable vehicle with a high degree of automation for the distribution of plant protection products in vineyards and greenhouses. The synergy between the vehicle and the spraying management system we developed is an innovative solution with high technological content, and attempts to account for the current European and global directives in the field of agricultural techniques. The objectives of our system are the development of an autonomous vehicle and a spraying management system that allows safe and accurate autonomous spraying operations.

We present a novel sensorized mat for monitoring infant's posture through the measure of pressure maps. The pressure-sensitive mat is based on an optoelectronic technology developed in the last few years at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna: a soft silicone skin cover, which constitutes the mat, participates in the transduction principle and provides the mat with compliance. The device has a modular structure (with a minimum of one and a maximum of six sub-modules, and a total surface area of about 1 m2) that enables dimensional adaptation of the pressure-sensitive area to different specific applications. The system consists of on-board electronics for data collection, pre-elaboration, and transmission to a remote computing unit for analysis and posture classification. In this work we present a complete description of the sensing apparatus along with its experimental characterization and validation with five healthy infants.

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