Advanced UAV–WSN System for Intelligent Monitoring in Precision Agriculture

Abstract

The growing need for food worldwide requires the development of a high-performance, high-productivity, and sustainable agriculture, which implies the introduction of new technologies into monitoring activities related to control and decision-making. In this regard, this paper presents a hierarchical structure based on the collaboration between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and federated wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for crop monitoring in precision agriculture. The integration of UAVs with intelligent, ground WSNs, and IoT proved to be a robust and efficient solution for data collection, control, analysis, and decisions in such specialized applications. Key advantages lay in online data collection and relaying to a central monitoring point, while effectively managing network load and latency through optimized UAV trajectories and in situ data processing. Two important aspects of the collaboration were considered: designing the UAV trajectories for efficient data collection and implementing effective data processing algorithms (consensus and symbolic aggregate approximation) at the network level for the transmission of the relevant data. The experiments were carried out at a Romanian research institute where different crops and methods are developed. The results demonstrate that the collaborative UAV–WSN–IoT approach increases the performances in both precision agriculture and ecological agriculture.

A Review of Applications and Communication Technologies for Internet of Things (IoT) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Based Sustainable Smart Farming

“…A similar application of UAVs is found in [28], where the authors proposed a novel technique to register UAV images of agricultural crops and reconstruct 3D models of the crop to monitor growth parameters of the plants. In smart farming, UAVs have also been integrated with smart sensors to perform many applications such as monitoring field conditions [29], yield quantity and quality [25], meteorological parameters such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction etc. [30].…”

DronAway: A Proposal on the Use of Remote Sensing Drones as Mobile Gateway for WSN in Precision Agriculture

“…For small amounts of data, a straight flight plan where the nodes are flown over can work. However, for significant amounts of data, flight plans where the drone circles the node until all the data is transmitted may be necessary [42]. In Figure 1, these two types of flight plans are shown.…”

Smart Environment Monitoring System using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in Bangladesh

“…In some cases UAV is considered as a relay node to establish the communication between sensor node in remote location and the base station. Hence the integration of UAVs with other system such as WSNs and IoT can be a robust and efficient solution for data collection, control, analysis, and decisions in such specialized applications [19]. A review paper in [20] Figure 2.…”