EchoYieldEstimation | A Sonar Sensing System for Crop Yield Estimation

Summary
With the rapidly growing world population, accelerated climate changes and global migration, nutritional security is a major challenge. This situation calls for fast development and utilisation of agricultural technology that will push agricultural yield production to its full potential.
Yield estimation in agricultural production is thus central for both agricultural planning as well as for successful agroeconomic management. Despite its importance, agricultural yield estimation is currently almost solely done manually without assisting technology and it is therefore inaccurate and limited to small areas.
To meet this challenge, we offer a unique sonar sensing system for large-scale, rapid yield estimation. Our technology, as demonstrated in a recent peer reviewed paper, and in additional preliminary studies has unexampled advantages compared to other sensors. The sonar-based crop estimating sensor has been patented and initial tests show that it is capable of estimating pepper and tomato yields with ~90% accuracy under laboratory conditions. The technology has several advantages over pursued optical based solutions including the ability to penetrate the vegetation and its functionality under all lighting conditions.
In the proposed project, we will expand those tests to additional key vegetables, e.g., cucumbers, and elaborate our approach to make it functional under field conditions, aiming to provide farmers with a reliable tool for crop estimation.
Our team is composed of sonar, agriculture, robotics and business experts, covering all of the needs of the project. We will collaborate with agri-robotics companies and agricultural stake-holders in the EU to fulfil the goals of our PoC project. The project will ultimately lead to the necessary steps for establishing a spin-off company that will exploit this invention and provide a product to the benefit of European and worldwide farmers.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101100903
Start date: 01-10-2022
End date: 31-03-2024
Total budget - Public funding: - 150 000,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

With the rapidly growing world population, accelerated climate changes and global migration, nutritional security is a major challenge. This situation calls for fast development and utilisation of agricultural technology that will push agricultural yield production to its full potential.
Yield estimation in agricultural production is thus central for both agricultural planning as well as for successful agroeconomic management. Despite its importance, agricultural yield estimation is currently almost solely done manually without assisting technology and it is therefore inaccurate and limited to small areas.
To meet this challenge, we offer a unique sonar sensing system for large-scale, rapid yield estimation. Our technology, as demonstrated in a recent peer reviewed paper, and in additional preliminary studies has unexampled advantages compared to other sensors. The sonar-based crop estimating sensor has been patented and initial tests show that it is capable of estimating pepper and tomato yields with ~90% accuracy under laboratory conditions. The technology has several advantages over pursued optical based solutions including the ability to penetrate the vegetation and its functionality under all lighting conditions.
In the proposed project, we will expand those tests to additional key vegetables, e.g., cucumbers, and elaborate our approach to make it functional under field conditions, aiming to provide farmers with a reliable tool for crop estimation.
Our team is composed of sonar, agriculture, robotics and business experts, covering all of the needs of the project. We will collaborate with agri-robotics companies and agricultural stake-holders in the EU to fulfil the goals of our PoC project. The project will ultimately lead to the necessary steps for establishing a spin-off company that will exploit this invention and provide a product to the benefit of European and worldwide farmers.

Status

SIGNED

Call topic

ERC-2022-POC2

Update Date

09-02-2023
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Horizon Europe
HORIZON.1 Excellent Science
HORIZON.1.1 European Research Council (ERC)
HORIZON.1.1.0 Cross-cutting call topics
ERC-2022-POC2 ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS2
HORIZON.1.1.1 Frontier science
ERC-2022-POC2 ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS2