Open Agricultural Burning Detection with Natural Inspired Swarm-based Detection Platform

Abstract

Agriculture often plays a big part in economic growth in most countries such as India, Indonesia, Thailand as well as Malaysia. Countries such as Thailand and Indonesia contribute a large volume of rice imports and export, however, in Indonesia, this major rice production comes with a large setback. Agriculture practices in Indonesia utilize open burning to process by-products of harvested rice fields to process it into bio-fertilizers which later fertilize the crop field. This is a problem as open burning on large scale causes major haze storms which spreads from Indonesia to the majority of parts of Malaysia annually. The composition of haze which includes carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide is hazardous to the human body when inhaled, they also contribute to the cause of air pollution. To reduces the severity of illegal open burning, we must first understand the overall characteristic of the smoke plume before introducing detection methods. Platforms such as drones and gliders with olfaction sensors can detect the plume thus locating the fire source. With the introduction of Swarm intelligence (SI), a drone detection platform can be deployed at large volumes to cover larger areas while localizing fire sources in a much more efficient fashion. Thus, this paper provides a review of swarm intelligence with the collaboration of sensors in optimizing plume dispersion problems and suggestions for future research ideas in collaborating detection platforms and SI. Open Burning has been a decade-long issue that the world trying to tackle when it comes to climate change. In Southeast Asia countries often, left-over crops are burnt openly, and the by-product of these open burning are utilized as bio-fertilizers which nourishes the crop fields. This has not only addressed the source of global warming but contributes to annual haze storm that affects countries like Malaysia and Thailand severely. To reduce the severity of open burning problems, we must first tackle the source of the problem, thus detecting the smoke plume emitted by these open burning can be the key to shutting down the possibility of open burning. However, detecting a smoke plume can be challenging as it is a dynamic problem that changes over time with external influences. Introducing Swarm Intelligence (SI) into the drone platform can reduce the time taken to localize the source of these open burning, and thus distinguishing these fire sources can minimize the impact of already ongoing open burning.