Navigating the CyberSEES
Cal Poly Assistant Professor and his Collaborators Have Received a National Science Foundation Award.
A small robot deftly navigates through a grove of avocado trees, equipped to take soil samples, moisture estimates and photographs. The area, densely populated by trees, is not visible from the grove’s edge.
Yet, because of advanced drone technology, the exact coordinates are readily available to deploy the robot to collect samples that will be analyzed and used to increase the overall health and production of the orchard.
Professor Bo Liu, who specializes in mechatronics in the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Department, knows that the use of technology by farmers and ranchers is critical to meet modern day demands on the agricultural industry.
The world population is expected to grow to 9.6 billion by 2050, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. In fact, the FAO predicts that food production must increase by 70 percent by 2050.
That growth far outpaces the natural resources available, such as land and water and current methods of food production.
“We need to optimize water use and get more food out of the field by using less labor and fewer chemicals,” said Liu. “And we need to do it now.”
Liu and his collaborators recently received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to fund his research related to smart farms, or farms using advanced technology.
He is collaborating with Professor Chandra Krintz of UC Santa Barbara and Professor Balaji Sethuramasamyraja of Fresno State to investigate the unification of cyberinfrastructure, such as cloud computing with advanced robotics technology to enable precision and agronomics-driven farming by individual growers – technology readily not available today.
Nationwide many large producers have already introduced advanced tools such as sensor measurements and data analysis into their operations to make them more efficient. However, small farmers often lose out.
Small growers and ranchers face the conundrum of knowing that they must increase productivity and efficiency but are unable to afford the often costly technology to make those advances or to analyze the massive amount of data collected, said Liu.
“We need a better solution to decrease costs and increase efficiency,” said Liu.
Liu is working with a team of Cal Poly undergraduate and graduate students to improve such technology in a way that makes it affordable for even the smallest of farms.
“To make agriculture more productive and the productivity gains sustainable, growers are increasingly turning to environmental sensor measurement, data acquisition, and data analysis,” Liu wrote in an abstract about his research.
However, those tools have failed to achieve widespread use by smaller agricultural operations.
“Robots have been used in the car industry to weld and assemble cars,” said Liu. “Yet farmers are still reliant on high-cost labor to pick their crops. There is not yet a lot of automation in agriculture. Small farmers simply can’t afford it.”
The premise is simple: a drone, robots and wireless sensors are used to collect data in a large agricultural area. That information is then streamed to the internet to be further studied using cloud based analytics.
But what becomes of that data? As it is now, it is downloaded into a “black box,” and farmers must then hire companies to analyze the data to know what improvements need to be made.
Liu argues that individual growers and ranchers are underserved by recent advances in commercial and research sectors that make data analytics costly and require that growers relinquish control over their data.
His goal is to ultimately create a system, called SmartFarm, that will integrate the data into a cloud-based data appliance with built-in analytics that will provide solutions to farmers tailored to their needs.
Farmers will then be able to use data-driven analysis and support to increase their productions sustainability.
“Scientific research continues to connect the pieces between climate change and permanently changing weather patterns, in California and beyond,” said Michael Burlingame, a part-time lecturer and graduate student at Cal Poly. “So it is now starting to be accepted that the water, once abundant to us, may never return to what it was. Knowing this, growers want to do everything they possibly can to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of every last drop of water they use.”
Burlingame is working directly with Liu on developing two tools necessary for precision agricultural practices: wireless, soil moisture-monitoring data collection equipment and an autonomous ground vehicle that is capable of sampling and collecting data for a wide range of crops.
The SmartFarm system’s success is contingent on education and outreach, Liu said. The technical advancements must be taught to youth, who are increasingly ecologically conscious, so that they can continue advances in precision agricultural science and meet the future global demands of food production.