DRONUTS

Drones for monitoring Hazelnut trees on the Territory.

Description

The DroNuts project consists of a hardware and software infrastructure, capable of providing the Piedmontese coriliculture sector with an economical and reliable remote sensing service based on the use of drones, which allows the assessment of physiopathological state of individual plants using ML / DL (machine learning / deep learning) algorithms.
This infrastructure aims to classify plants according to their physiological condition, following abiotic stress (water stress) and/or biotic stress (attack by viruses, fungi, bacteria and insects).
The introduction of a constant and standardised monitoring system of the physiological state of plants will make it possible to rationalise agronomic and defence practices.

Result to be enhanced

The project “Dronuts” demonstrated that monitoring hazelnut crops from above, through photos captured by drones, is possible. Automatic image analysis, with ML / DL (machine learning / deep learning) algorithms developed by the Polytechnic University of Turin, allows for a good ability to recognize plants with some type of suffering problems.

Why is it important?

The use of drones to monitor hazelnut groves, combined with the use of a cloud-based software application for image processing, represents an innovative tool to monitor crops and preventively isolate diseased plants, while waiting for more detailed investigations, thus reducing investigation and intervention time and costs.