GrazeSense is an all-in-one agricultural application designed to enhance livestock and gracing management through innovative technology and smart practices. Exploiting autonomous swarms of drones and advanced vegetation analysis GrazeSense is capable of scanning large and diverse areas, detecting and analyzing possible grazing lands, based on forage quality and environmental conditions and proposing the optimum pasture option. It offers to herd owners real time actionable insights via a simple and user friendly platform, delivering focused information, without overwhelming them with raw data and unnecessary complexity. Emphasized on easy-of-use, GraceSense helps farmers to take optimum decisions, even if they are not familiarized with technology, allowing them to efficiently organize the herd movement, achieving gracing sufficiency, while protecting the pasture health and sustainability.
GrazeSense integrates also complementary features like herd monitoring and animal counting for offering a holistic solution to farmers. GraceSense, while is designed to transmit data through the terrestrial wireless network, it exploits satellite connectivity for establishing reliable operation in remote areas and in harsh landscape that terrestrial network is unavailable or unreliable. This connectivity feature is quite critical, as the herd often need to access remote areas (e.g. mountain peaks or deep valleys) for finding adequate forage density and the proper weather conditions. The solution is designed to run on the edge of the network for faster processing and latency minimization. Thus, the users can receive guaranteed service, real-time insights and recommendations, regardless of the pasture location and terrestrial network limitations.
Furthermore, GrazeSense is capable of sending selected data to AGRARIAN data storage, contributing to the wider livestock management from policy makers, while it is flexible to adopt already existing technologies from AGRARIAN project to further expand its services.
Technologies:
- Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras
- Terrestrial and non-terrestrial communications for UAVs control and data (5G/satellites)
- Decision Support System on a Web-application with simple and user friendly interface
- AI models for data analysis
- Edge network implementation
Challenges:
- Identify the real needs of farmers and translate them into system requirements
- Create a web application interface friendly to farmers without any technical knowledge
- Real time data transmission from the UAVs to the edge server through the satellite network
- Adequate AI and algorithms performance through the satellite link
- Platform optimization for edge implementation
- Autonomous UAV flight based on the user’s input through the available network
