Real-time Agriculture Field Monitoring Using IoT-based Sensors and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper introduces a system to monitor agriculture fields in real time. It includes a sensor network for in situ data collection and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)) system for remote sensing. The sensor network uses a number of sensor nodes to measure different parameters of the plants and environment such as temperature, humidity, and nitrogen composition. For data communication, the sensor network uses LoRa, a low-power wide-area network modulation technique, that allows receiving signals from sensor nodes at a distance of up to 450 m for a single receiver. The UAV includes visual and near infrared cameras to collect photos of the field. The data collection is carried out automatically via a path planning process that takes into account the overlapping ratio and resolution of the photos. The data collected is then handled by a cloud server that allows users to access in real time via a web-based application and an application on smartphones. A number of experiments have been conducted with the system being tested in several agricultural sites to evaluate its practical applicability.