Development of a Vehicle-Mounted Crop Detection System

Abstract

In order to monitor plant chlorophyll content in real-time, a new vehicle-mounted detection system was developed to measure crop canopy spectral characteristics. It was designed to work as a wireless sensor network with one control unit and one measuring unit. The control unit included a personal digital assistant (PDA) device with a ZigBee wireless network coordinator. As the coordinator of the whole wireless network, the control unit was used to receive, display and store all the data sent from sensor nodes. The measuring unit consisted of several optical sensor nodes. All the sensor nodes were mounted on an on-board mechanical structure so that the measuring unit could collect the canopy spectral data while moving. Each sensor node contained four optical channels to measure the light radiation at the wavebands of 550, 650, 766, and 850 nm. The calibration tests verified a good performance in terms of the wireless transmission ability and the sensor measurement precision. Both stationary and moving field experiments were also conducted in a winter wheat experimental field. There was a high correlation between chlorophyll content and vegetation index, and several estimation models of the chlorophyll content were established. The highest R2 of the estimation models was 0.718. The results showed that the vehicle-mounted crop detection system has potential for field application.

Keywords

• optical sensor
• vegetation index
• chlorophyll content
• ZigBee
• wireless sensor network (WSN)