Acquiring plant features with optical sensing devices in an organic strip-cropping system

There is an increasing market for organic agriculture (Golijan & Popovis, 2016). However, the lack of attention for biodiversity and soil fertility of current practices is a pressing issue. The SUREVEG project (CORE Organic Cofund, 2018) therefore looks at strip-cropping in organic production and its implementation in intensive farming to improve soil fertility and biodiversity throughout Europe. The aim is to enhance resilience (Wojtkowski, 2008), system sustainability, local nutrient recycling, and soil carbon storage (Wang, Li & Alva, 2010) among others. To counteract the additional labour of a multi-crop system, a robotic tool is proposed, which will operate upside down suspended from a wide-span mobile carriage. Within the project framework, a modular proof-of-concept (POC) version will be produced, combining sensing technologies with actuation in the form of a robotic arm. This POC will focus on fertilization needs, which are to be identified in real-time at the single-plant scale.

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