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Publications

Publications by Filipe Neves Santos

2020

Smartphone Applications Targeting Precision Agriculture Practices-A Systematic Review

Authors
Mendes, J; Pinho, TM; dos Santos, FN; Sousa, JJ; Peres, E; Boaventura Cunha, J; Cunha, M; Morais, R;

Publication
AGRONOMY-BASEL

Abstract
Traditionally farmers have used their perceptual sensorial systems to diagnose and monitor their crops health and needs. However, humans possess five basic perceptual systems with accuracy levels that can change from human to human which are largely dependent on the stress, experience, health and age. To overcome this problem, in the last decade, with the help of the emergence of smartphone technology, new agronomic applications were developed to reach better, cost-effective, more accurate and portable diagnosis systems. Conventional smartphones are equipped with several sensors that could be useful to support near real-time usual and advanced farming activities at a very low cost. Therefore, the development of agricultural applications based on smartphone devices has increased exponentially in the last years. However, the great potential offered by smartphone applications is still yet to be fully realized. Thus, this paper presents a literature review and an analysis of the characteristics of several mobile applications for use in smart/precision agriculture available on the market or developed at research level. This will contribute to provide to farmers an overview of the applications type that exist, what features they provide and a comparison between them. Also, this paper is an important resource to help researchers and applications developers to understand the limitations of existing tools and where new contributions can be performed.

2020

Path Planning for ground robots in agriculture: a short review

Authors
Santos, LC; Santos, FN; Solteiro Pires, EJS; Valente, A; Costa, P; Magalhaes, S;

Publication
2020 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTONOMOUS ROBOT SYSTEMS AND COMPETITIONS (ICARSC 2020)

Abstract
The world's population is estimated to reach nine billion people by the year 2050, which indicates that agricultural productivity must increase sustainably. The mechanisation and automatisation of agricultural tasks is an essential step to face population growth. Ground robots have been developed along the last decade for several agricultural applications, being, the autonomous and safe navigation one of the hardest challenge in this development. Moving autonomously, a mobile platform involves different tasks, such as localisation, mapping, motion control, and path planning, a crucial step for autonomous operations. This article performs a survey of different applications for path planning techniques applied to various agricultural contexts. This paper analyses different agricultural applications and details about the employed path planning method. The conclusion indicates that path planning has been successfully applied to agrarian robots for field coverage and point-to-point navigation, being that coverage path planning is slightly more advanced in this field.

2020

Vineyard trunk detection using deep learning - An experimental device benchmark

Authors
Pinto de Aguiar, ASP; Neves dos Santos, FBN; Feliz dos Santos, LCF; de Jesus Filipe, VMD; Miranda de Sousa, AJM;

Publication
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE

Abstract
Research and development in mobile robotics are continuously growing. The ability of a human-made machine to navigate safely in a given environment is a challenging task. In agricultural environments, robot navigation can achieve high levels of complexity due to the harsh conditions that they present. Thus, the presence of a reliable map where the robot can localize itself is crucial, and feature extraction becomes a vital step of the navigation process. In this work, the feature extraction issue in the vineyard context is solved using Deep Learning to detect high-level features - the vine trunks. An experimental performance benchmark between two devices is performed: NVIDIA's Jetson Nano and Google's USB Accelerator. Several models were retrained and deployed on both devices, using a Transfer Learning approach. Specifically, MobileNets, Inception, and lite version of You Only Look Once are used to detect vine trunks in real-time. The models were retrained in a built in-house dataset, that is publicly available. The training dataset contains approximately 1600 annotated vine trunks in 336 different images. Results show that NVIDIA's Jetson Nano provides compatibility with a wider variety of Deep Learning architectures, while Google's USB Accelerator is limited to a unique family of architectures to perform object detection. On the other hand, the Google device showed an overall Average precision higher than Jetson Nano, with a better runtime performance. The best result obtained in this work was an average precision of 52.98% with a runtime performance of 23.14 ms per image, for MobileNet-V2. Recent experiments showed that the detectors are suitable for the use in the Localization and Mapping context.

2020

Occupancy Grid and Topological Maps Extraction from Satellite Images for Path Planning in Agricultural Robots

Authors
Santos, LC; Aguiar, AS; Santos, FN; Valente, A; Petry, M;

Publication
ROBOTICS

Abstract
Robotics will significantly impact large sectors of the economy with relatively low productivity, such as Agri-Food production. Deploying agricultural robots on the farm is still a challenging task. When it comes to localising the robot, there is a need for a preliminary map, which is obtained from a first robot visit to the farm. Mapping is a semi-autonomous task that requires a human operator to drive the robot throughout the environment using a control pad. Visual and geometric features are used by Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) Algorithms to model and recognise places, and track the robot's motion. In agricultural fields, this represents a time-consuming operation. This work proposes a novel solution-called AgRoBPP-bridge-to autonomously extract Occupancy Grid and Topological maps from satellites images. These preliminary maps are used by the robot in its first visit, reducing the need of human intervention and making the path planning algorithms more efficient. AgRoBPP-bridge consists of two stages: vineyards row detection and topological map extraction. For vineyards row detection, we explored two approaches, one that is based on conventional machine learning technique, by considering Support Vector Machine with Local Binary Pattern-based features, and another one found in deep learning techniques (ResNET and DenseNET). From the vineyards row detection, we extracted an occupation grid map and, by considering advanced image processing techniques and Voronoi diagrams concept, we obtained a topological map. Our results demonstrated an overall accuracy higher than 85% for detecting vineyards and free paths for robot navigation. The Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based approach demonstrated the best performance in terms of precision and computational resources consumption. AgRoBPP-bridge shows to be a relevant contribution to simplify the deployment of robots in agriculture.

2020

Temporal analysis of the vineyard phenology from remote sensing data using Google Earth Engine

Authors
Jesus, J; Santos, F; Gomes, A; Teodoro, AC;

Publication
REMOTE SENSING FOR AGRICULTURE, ECOSYSTEMS, AND HYDROLOGY XXII

Abstract
Precision Agriculture (PA) has a fundamental role in the sustainability of agricultural systems, supporting decision-making of agricultural crops, increasing yield and quality in production. In the present research a PA approach for viticulture was made combining remote sensing data and robotic monitoring. With this approach it was intended to perform a spatial-temporal analysis of the grapevine phenology, according the 3 periods of the grape's biological cycle reproductive cycle, peak of the season and vegetative dormancy - corresponding to the years of 2017/18, for a specific area of the Green Wine Region, from Celorico de Basto (Portugal). The proposed methodology is based in the automation of spatial analyses through Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Python programming language. GEE was used for image acquisition and processing data of several indices, as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI) and Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index ( VARI). Regarding the geoprocessing of environmental factors, it was considered the following parameters: precipitation, temperature and soil moisture. Afterwards, NDVI was selected for a space-time analysis of the vineyard phenology, once this index represents a close dynamic to the vineyard biological cycle. From the relation between environmental factors and NDVI it was possible to interpret the space-time dynamics of the vineyard phenology. Finally, a spatial interpolation of yield and NDVI was made to understand the influence of NDVI in the yield. It can be assumed that the NDVI does not have a statistically significant influence on vineyard yield.

2020

Localization and Mapping for Robots in Agriculture and Forestry: A Survey

Authors
Aguiar, AS; dos Santos, FN; Cunha, JB; Sobreira, H; Sousa, AJ;

Publication
ROBOTICS

Abstract
Research and development of autonomous mobile robotic solutions that can perform several active agricultural tasks (pruning, harvesting, mowing) have been growing. Robots are now used for a variety of tasks such as planting, harvesting, environmental monitoring, supply of water and nutrients, and others. To do so, robots need to be able to perform online localization and, if desired, mapping. The most used approach for localization in agricultural applications is based in standalone Global Navigation Satellite System-based systems. However, in many agricultural and forest environments, satellite signals are unavailable or inaccurate, which leads to the need of advanced solutions independent from these signals. Approaches like simultaneous localization and mapping and visual odometry are the most promising solutions to increase localization reliability and availability. This work leads to the main conclusion that, few methods can achieve simultaneously the desired goals of scalability, availability, and accuracy, due to the challenges imposed by these harsh environments. In the near future, novel contributions to this field are expected that will help one to achieve the desired goals, with the development of more advanced techniques, based on 3D localization, and semantic and topological mapping. In this context, this work proposes an analysis of the current state-of-the-art of localization and mapping approaches in agriculture and forest environments. Additionally, an overview about the available datasets to develop and test these approaches is performed. Finally, a critical analysis of this research field is done, with the characterization of the literature using a variety of metrics.

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