Development of an innovative smart-farming and decision-support service to improve clingstone peach cultivation

Abstract

AgroNIT is an integrated IoT framework aiming to foster innovative solutions for the optimization of clingstone peach production in central Macedonia, Greece. AgroNIT features energy-autonomous mesh wireless sensor networks (WSN), cloud computing and decision-support systems (DSS) using artificial intelligence (AI). It serves as a hybrid smart-farming service, as well as a large-scale living laboratory (testbed). The AgroNIT system consists of three services-tiers: the data collection (Edge System), the data analytics (NITOS Cloud) and the data presentation service (Software Application). The WSN testbed consists of 25 custom-made IoT sensing devices and 13 LTE gateway nodes. The end nodes feature various sensors with two main functional types: (i) the agrometeorological node for monitoring key crop, soil and climatic parameters at field or microclimate level, and (ii) the visual crop node, an image-aware module equipped with an RGB camera to enable crop monitoring via 2D image collection. The gateway nodes are responsible for the collection and transmittance of the sensing data to the proprietary Cloud via the internet. The Cloud is a data aggregation and data analytics service, whose purpose is to extract knowledge from the raw data by employing big data analysis, machine/deep-learning and data mining algorithms. The produced knowledge can contribute to sustainable production management through precise determination of peach phenological stages including bud dormancy breaking, targeted plant protection, critical stages for optimal fertilization and irrigation, severe weather phenomena forecasting and management, fruit ripening and yield prediction. For the data visualization the AgroNIT software application was developed for Web and mobile devices and integrates various decision-support services related to key cultivation practices supporting all the involved parties (farmers, advisors, industry). © 2022 International Society for Horticultural Science. All rights reserved.