Precision agriculture (PA) concept is based on observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops or livestock. The goal is to facilitate a decision support system (DSS) for whole farm management with the goal of optimizing returns on inputs while preserving resources. Among these many approaches we focus on three specific applications: precise irrigation, early crops disease detection and early detection of pain in dairy cows.
This research consists of development and validation of effective, reliable and applicable algorithms for early detection (ED) of contaminations in drinking water (DW) from one or more sources, using data from WQ sensors. Specifically, anomaly detection in UV-absorbance spectra as means for contamination detection is presented. An additional ED algorithm, has also been developed, utilizing WQ measurements of standard physicochemical parameters. The algorithm’s high performance, together with its simplicity, adjustability, ease of implementation and low computational complexity – make it a valuable addition to water monitoring systems. Testing the performance of the two ED algorithms showed that processing physicochemical WQ measurements to detect anomalies, can serve as effective EDSs’ for DW contaminations.
Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made low-cost, micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs can operate as a set of individual nodes, or may be interconnected to form a Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensor Network (WDESN). MSU’s lower power consumption and small size enable many new applications, such as mobile sensing. MSUs’ main limitation is their relatively low accuracy, with respect to laboratory equipment or an AQM station. In this project we examine algorithms for assessing these sensors in field operations, as well as autonomous calibration and error concealment, optimal placement of the sensors and the utilization of the mobile sensors in the process, and advanced algorithms for data analysis provide a comprehensive toolset for atmospheric data analysis.
