Autonomous Agricultural Monitoring with Aerial Drones and RF Energy-Harvesting Sensor Tags

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kudyba, Paul S., Sun, Haijian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Kudyba, Paul S.
Sun, Haijian
author_facet Kudyba, Paul S.
Sun, Haijian
contents In precision agriculture and plant science, there is an increasing demand for wireless sensors that are easy to deploy, maintain, and monitor. This paper investigates a novel approach that leverages recent advances in extremely low-power wireless communication and sensing, as well as the rapidly increasing availability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. By mounting a specialized wireless payload on a UAV, battery-less sensor tags can harvest wireless beacon signals emitted from the drone, dramatically reducing the cost per sensor. These tags can measure environmental information such as temperature and humidity, then encrypt and transmit the data in the range of several meters. An experimental implementation was constructed at AERPAW, an NSF-funded wireless aerial drone research platform. While ground-based tests confirmed reliable sensor operation and data collection, airborne trials encountered wireless interference that impeded successfully detecting tag data. Despite these challenges, our results suggest further refinements could improve reliability and advance precision agriculture and agrarian research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Autonomous Agricultural Monitoring with Aerial Drones and RF Energy-Harvesting Sensor Tags
Kudyba, Paul S.
Sun, Haijian
Networking and Internet Architecture
Signal Processing
In precision agriculture and plant science, there is an increasing demand for wireless sensors that are easy to deploy, maintain, and monitor. This paper investigates a novel approach that leverages recent advances in extremely low-power wireless communication and sensing, as well as the rapidly increasing availability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. By mounting a specialized wireless payload on a UAV, battery-less sensor tags can harvest wireless beacon signals emitted from the drone, dramatically reducing the cost per sensor. These tags can measure environmental information such as temperature and humidity, then encrypt and transmit the data in the range of several meters. An experimental implementation was constructed at AERPAW, an NSF-funded wireless aerial drone research platform. While ground-based tests confirmed reliable sensor operation and data collection, airborne trials encountered wireless interference that impeded successfully detecting tag data. Despite these challenges, our results suggest further refinements could improve reliability and advance precision agriculture and agrarian research.
title Autonomous Agricultural Monitoring with Aerial Drones and RF Energy-Harvesting Sensor Tags
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16028