Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 6

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/339185329

The Future of Digital Agriculture: Technologies and Opportunities

Article in IT Professional · January 2020


DOI: 10.1109/MITP.2019.2963412

CITATIONS READS

9 2,118

5 authors, including:

Spyros Fountas Borja Espejo García


Agricultural University of Athens Agricultural University of Athens
157 PUBLICATIONS 3,387 CITATIONS 12 PUBLICATIONS 104 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Aikaterini Kasimati Nikolaos Mylonas


Agricultural University of Athens Agricultural University of Athens
6 PUBLICATIONS 38 CITATIONS 11 PUBLICATIONS 76 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Multidisciplinary Special Issue "Multi-source data fusion of big spatial-temporal data in soil, geo-engineering and environmental studies" (Science of the Total
Environment) View project

INNOSETA - H2020 Thematic network Innovative Spraying Equipment Training Advising View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Spyros Fountas on 15 May 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.


Theme Article: Envisioning Our Future Digital World

The Future of Digital


Agriculture: Technologies
and Opportunities
Spyros Fountas, Borja Espejo-Garcıa,
Aikaterini Kasimati, Nikolaos Mylonas, and
Nicoleta Darra
Agricultural University of Athens

Abstract—This article presents key technological advances in the digital agriculture,


which will have significant impact. Artificial intelligence-based techniques, together with
big data analytics, address the challenges of agricultural production in terms of
productivity and sustainability. Emerging new applications will transform agriculture from
the traditional farm practices to a highly automated and data intensive industry.

& THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION is transforming agri- Precision agriculture management systems are
culture by using modern machinery, computer- allowing growers to benefit from this new tsunami
ized tools, and information and communication of data they can gather. These systems collect,
technologies (ICTs) to improve decision making classify, and analyze vast amounts of data to
and productivity. The spread of several cutting- detect patterns and solutions. They enable farm-
edge technologies, from GPS and remote sensing ers to observe, comprehend, and manage the vari-
to big data, artificial intelligence and machine ability in their production systems by tailoring
learning, robotics, and the Internet of Things inputs to get desired outputs. GPS-controlled trac-
(IoT), to agriculture is leading to increased tors can work around the clock, ploughing, plant-
yields, lower costs, and reduced environmental ing, and harvesting while gathering continuous
impact. Data-driven solutions are unlocking pro- “on-the-go” georeferenced data. These self-driving
duction potential in a sustainable and resource- vehicles can perform precise operations, with the
efficient way. help of GPS, Geographical Information Systems
(GIS), and Variable-Rate Technology (VRT).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITP.2019.2963412 Weather stations supply a variety of agricul-
Date of current version 12 February 2020. ture-specific weather data. Such weather data

1520-9202 ß 2020 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society IT Professional


24
Authorized licensed use limited to: Agricultural University of Athens. Downloaded on February 13,2020 at 08:46:07 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
are fed into the big data pool and promote farm- variations of weather conditions and management
ing decisions, such as irrigation decision making strategies. These sensors exploit vegetation’s
based on plant-water demand and accurate fore- reflectance properties and provide the opportu-
cast of harvest dates. Remote and proximal sens- nity to assess biomass, yield, acreage, vegetation
ing is used to capture invaluable soil and crop vigor, drought stress, and phenological develop-
related data through hyperspectral, multispec- ment, enabling early and efficient decision making
tral, and thermal sensors or cameras. Unmanned in fertilization, irrigation, and pest management.
aerial vehicles (UAV) for agricultural purposes Currently, the commercial availability of very
have the potential to be used from analysis high-resolution satellite data that varies in tech-
applications, by producing soil and field three- nique (active/passive, radiometer/scatterome-
dimensional models, data acquisition, and crop ter), spatial resolution (from submeter to
growth monitoring, to spraying or planting appli- kilometers), spectral range, and viewing geometry
cations.1 They are delivering regularly updated has opened up a number of new perspectives on
high-quality data to provide insight into crop the use of earth observation products in agricul-
development and highlight ineffective practices tural monitoring,3 both at large and small scale
to track changes in health and maturity and to areas. Similar information can also be retrieved by
identify parts of a field experiencing “hydric UAV remote sensing systems, which are often
stress.” UAVs have also proven well suited for operated at very low altitude. Such systems use
crop spraying, as they can apply fertiliser, herbi- multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal cam-
cide, and pesticide liquids faster, more accu- eras that can measure heat, radiation, or light to
rately, and with higher efficiency. Finally, UAV- capture a diverse electromagnetic spectrum.
planting systems are under development by Although data retrieval in this case is less depen-
using compressed air to fire seedpods directly dent on weather conditions, simplifying or even
into the ground. omitting atmospheric correction, these images
The digitalization enables farmers to control cover much less area compared to the satellite
their farms remotely and manage agricultural products.
activities in a more effective way. In the near Technological advancements, such as analyt-
future, IoT will allow for automatic real-time ical platforms, multispectral and hyperspectral
interaction, controlling, and decision-making as sensors, as well as satellite data hubs that pro-
agriculture sensors, actuators, and devices, as vide free and open access to satellite products [
aforementioned, will all be interconnected. This e.g., Copernicus Open Access Hub (ESA), Earth-
will minimize human effort while saving time and Explorer (United States Geological Survey),
increasing both yield and profit.2 The emergence National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
of cloud-based farm management platforms, tion (United States Department of Commerce)],
such as the SmartFarm and Agrivi, aims to inte- can act as the stepping stone for building reli-
grate these data coming multiple sources and able agronomic models on the basis of existing
include decision support systems. All these give data generated by innovative monitoring appli-
growers insights for dynamic management plan- cations. Furthermore, the development of agri-
ning, which have traditionally only been avail- cultural infrastructure networks that allow faster
able to corporate megafarms. A general and complete mining of the agricultural informa-
overview of the digital agriculture can be seen in tion through satellite data in deeper and broader
Figure 1. horizons is necessary to improve the quality and
efficiency of agricultural monitoring. This can
also accelerate the delivery of agricultural data
REMOTE SENSING platforms, which could provide timely compre-
A variety of remote sensing technologies, from hensive information, to guide agronomic and
proximal sensors (within 1 m distance from the economic decision making. However, the limited
monitoring object), to drones, to satellites are access of the farmers to the ground truth infor-
used by the agricultural sector, providing insight mation becomes an obstacle to evaluate the
to tackle the uncertainties coming from the crop status under various environmental

January/February 2020
25
Authorized licensed use limited to: Agricultural University of Athens. Downloaded on February 13,2020 at 08:46:07 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Envisioning Our Future Digital World

Figure 1. View of a digital agricultural field that has IoT devices to sense soil moisture, robotic vehicles
(ground and aerial), and antennas to receive satellite images. Copyright: Authors; published with permission.

conditions. Therefore, efforts to establish net- ROBOTIC SYSTEMS TO AUTOMATE


works of validation sites with the support of MONOTONOUS FARM OPERATIONS
space agencies and/or environmental institu- Robotic systems have found fertile ground in
tions are required. agriculture tasks, due to the progress of ICT tech-
Some of the challenges in agricultural remote nologies, mainly advanced sensing, actuation,
sensing are related to standartalization of the and AI. The increasing demand for accurate field
data coming from different types of sources and operations, while reducing the farming inputs
different georeferenced systems, which cause and environmental impact, constitute robotic
problems on image projection and mapping. A platforms as the alternative of conventional trac-
space, aerial, and ground integrated structure to tors and implements. Small sized, electrically
manage multiple sources of the remotely sensed driven platforms are employed for a wide range
crop parameters for agricultural data acquisition of tasks, such as light ploughing, spraying, fertiliz-
can also be the key to accurate visualization and ing, and harvesting. Especially in greenhouse pro-
monitoring of the crop status from multiple per- duction, due to the controlled environment
spectives. The heterogeneity of satellite products conditions and structured cultivation properties,
in terms of spatial, spectral, temporal, and radio- there are already commercial solutions offering
metric characteristics can also cause accuracy significant advantages mainly for fruit harvesting.
problems and be highly inadequate with the Finally, robotics have found several applications
wrong approach. Finally, advanced remote sens- in livestock production, with more prominent evi-
ing technologies generate a massive amount data dence such as autonomous milking robots,
of high volume and complexity, increasing the manure scraping, and feeding platforms, com-
challenges of data storage and computation bined with individualized care and health moni-
power, leading to serious issues in data manage- toring using identification technologies like RFID.
ment. For potential users, the wide variety of Considering the technological edge that these
products can be confusing, and the analysis platforms can offer to agriculture, there are impor-
of the derived data is sometimes still too tant challenges that prevent robotics from reach-
complicated. ing their full potential. The existing prototypes

26 IT Professional

Authorized licensed use limited to: Agricultural University of Athens. Downloaded on February 13,2020 at 08:46:07 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
and commercial platforms are limited to task-spe- deep learning, such as transfer learning or cap-
cific operations, whereas the scalability to differ- sule networks, will lead future decision making
ent crops or environments is questioned. by taking into account several factors, such as
Furthermore, there are many interoperability and environmental conditions, harvesting practices,
standardization problems when it comes to agro- financial needs, soil characteristics, or water
robotics, with the communication of platforms availability.
and safety issues posing considerable barriers. Deep learning methods, specifically convolu-
Expanding the capabilities of robots from the lab tional nets (CNNs), are gaining fast growth for
and greenhouse environment to the outdoor con- the automation of crop classification and dis-
ditions is crucial, when it comes to sensing under ease/weed identification. The main reason is
harsh environments and operating under unpre- that contrary to the conventional machine-learn-
dicting conditions. Regardless of the technical ing techniques, CNN training allows automatic
barriers, there is considerable skepticism related learning representations of data with multiple
to social, economical, and ethical challenges in levels of abstraction. Although CNNs are very
agricultural robotics. Labor shift from repetitive data demanding, a technique called transfer
tasks to high-skilled engineering jobs and the learning is used to overcome this requirement
imbalanced adoption of agritechnologies by farm- by reusing patterns learned by state-of-the-art
ers is expected to create social implications. CNNs in the related tasks. Additionally, CNNs
Advanced intelligence and decision-making capa- have also shown promising results with other
bilities of robots results in debates about moral problems, such as yield prediction, by extracting
aspects and, overall, who has the responsibility patterns from satellite imagery.
for these actions. Moreover, expensive technolo- In the future, other techniques are expected to
gies and the demand for resources and infrastruc- emerge solve open problems in agriculture.
tures to launch robotics in the field will challenge Regarding to computer vision related problems,
the effective adoption of robotics from the feasi- such as crop classification and disease/weed
bility point of view. identification, new architectures, such as capsule
Moving toward the era of intelligence systems, networks, will address current CNN limitations.4
robotic platforms will be the cornerstone of agri- Contrary to CNNs, capsules (grouped neurons)
culture operations. UAV platforms will manage consider the spatial relationships between enti-
several light weight tasks, such as spraying and ties and learn these relationships via dynamic
health inspections, as well as supervising ground routing, utilizing a nonlinear function called
robot fleets operating in the field. In the future, squashing. In regard to the use of reinforcement
robots will be able to collaborate with humans learning instead of the supervised one, architec-
without compromising safety in tasks like harvest- tures, such as imagination-augmented agents, will
ing. To this end, robot cognition is expected to also play an important role, extending intelligence
reach supremacy levels, with the systems able to through imagination by learning to interpret pre-
have full environment awareness and clear reason- dictions from a learned environment model.5
ing of the decisions taken, for example, how to On the other hand, the extraction of informa-
treat rotten fruit during harvesting or interrupt tion from natural language documents contain-
spraying when humans are in close range. ing policies and regulations could be addressed
by a recurrent neural network (RNN). Specifi-
cally, a subtype of RNNs called long short-term
AI IN DIGITAL AGRICULTURE memories have arisen in the past years as good
AI applications in agriculture are increasing. at modeling varying length sequential data,
Deep learning constitutes the state-of-the-art achieving state-of-the-art results for many prob-
method for image and language processing with lems in natural language processing (NLP), such
promising results for addressing farming prob- as machine translation, information extraction,
lems, such as weed detection, plant disease diag- and text classification. Similar to computer
nosis, crop type classification, and pesticide vision, the use of transfer learning by word
recommendations. Techniques stemming from embedding techniques based on ELMO and

January/February 2020
27
Authorized licensed use limited to: Agricultural University of Athens. Downloaded on February 13,2020 at 08:46:07 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Envisioning Our Future Digital World

BERT will help to avoid the expensive creation of 4. S. Sabour, N. Frosst, and G. E. Hinton, “Dynamic
the necessary language model for more routing between capsules,” in Proc. 31st Int. Conf.
advanced NLP tasks. Such systems have been Neural Inf. Process., 2017, pp. 3859–3869.
used to extract expert knowledge for regulations re et al., “Imagination-augmented agents
5. S. Racanie
on pesticide use or agricultural knowledge from for deep reinforcement learning,” Adv. Neural Inf.
existing research databases. Process. Syst., 2017. arXiv:1707.06203.
Finally, another technique will be relevant in
the near future: generative adversarial networks
Spyros Fountas is an associate professor with
(GANs). This type of network could address the
the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece. He
problem of data scarcity within agricultural com-
received the M.Sc. degree in information technology
puter vision when transfer learning and tradi-
from Cranfield University, Cranfield, U.K. and the
tional data augmentation are not enough. The Ph.D. degree in precision agriculture from Copenha-
main advantage of GANs is that they can create gen University, Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the
pictures with synthetic “real” crops instead of Editor-in-Chief for Computers and Electronics in
just rotating or adding noise to the existing Agriculture (Elsevier), since 2014. He is the
ones. This synthetic data could be used to corresponding author of this article. Contact him at
improve the generalization ability of a CNN that sfountas@aua.gr.
obtains poor results due to the constraints in
Borja Espejo-Garcia is a postdoc researcher with
the size of the original dataset and the limita-
the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece. From
tions of the traditional techniques.
2015 to 2019, he worked toward the Ph.D. degree in
artificial intelligence with the University of Zaragoza,
CONCLUSION Spain, and the M.Sc. degree in computer science
Digital agriculture is developing rapidly, with a postgraduate course in systems engineering.
driven by many technological advances in the Contact him at borjaeg@aua.gr.
area of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and
robotic systems. These systems enable farmers Aikaterini Kasimati is an agricultural engineer with
experience in precision agriculture, bioenvironmental
to produce comprehensive, accurate, and trans-
engineering, and energy production. She received the
parent crop and livestock products, both at the
M.Sc. degree in agricultural and biological engineer-
national and regional levels and to get increased
ing from the University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA.
yield and quality, minimizing the environmental She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree with
impact. However, several challenges and limita- the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, in the
tions, such as accuracy, interoperability, data field of precision agriculture and big data analytics.
storage, computation power, and farmers reluc- Contact her at akasimati@aua.gr.
tance to adoption, need to be addressed for effec-
tive use of these technologies and widespread Nikos Mylonas is a mechanical engineer and
digital transformation of agriculture. received the M.Sc. degree in biosystems engineering,
Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen,
the Netherlands, focusing on computer vision in agri-
& REFERENCES culture. His main research interests include the field of
AI and robotic applications in horticulture. Contact
1. J. Miranda, P. Ponce, A. Molina, and P. Wright,
him at nmylonas@aua.gr
“Sensing, smart and sustainable technologies for Agri-
Food 4.0,” Comput. Industry, vol. 108, pp. 21–36, 2019. Nicoleta Darra is an agricultural biotechnologist
2. A. Khanna and S. Kaur, “Evolution of Internet of Things with the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece,
(IoT) and its significant impact in the field of Precision from where she received the M.Sc. degree in bioin-
Agriculture,” Comput. Electron. Agriculture, vol. 157, formatics. For three years, she has been involved in
pp. 218–231, 2019. research on precision agriculture with emphasis
3. S. R. Oza, S. Panigrahy, and J. S. Parihar, “Concurrent on remote sensing applications. Contact her at
use of active and passive microwave remotesensing nicoletadarra@aua.gr.
data for monitoring of rice crop,” Int. J. Appl. Earth
Obst. Geoinform., vol. 10, pp. 296–304, 2008.

28 IT Professional

Authorized licensed
View publication stats use limited to: Agricultural University of Athens. Downloaded on February 13,2020 at 08:46:07 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.

You might also like