Monorail-based Monitoring System for Multipoint Field Observation

Many researches support farmers to collect physiological and environmental data automatically to increase the value of agricultural products. In the research area of a field monitoring, this paper proposes a monorail type field monitoring system for multiple point observation. The proposed system, including a moving camera, a station, and rail can automatically move on a rail and can take pictures of targets at different points in a field. Collected data such as image and sensor values are transferred to cloud services such as Flickr and Twitter through the Internet. Our system can realize low cost and high quality field monitoring. Hardware experiments to confirm the capability of the proposed monorail-based monitoring system in terms of the photographed image quality were performed. The experimental results showed that the system stably moved on the rail and obtained the same composition images when targets to be photographed were placed in different places.