VineRobot: on-the-go vineyard monitoring with non-invasive sensors

Abstract

In the last decades, the remarkable development of new technologies and the growing demand for greater competitiveness and sustainability have led to a great interest in precision viticulture, which proposes a differentiated agronomic management of vineyards based on the spatial-temporal variability of vegetative development, production, and quality of the grapes. A forefront and sustainable viticulture requires objective and continuous monitoring of key parameters for rational decision making. In this context, the first prototype of a novel use-case agricultural robot which will be equipped with several non-invasive sensing technologies is presented to monitor key agronomical and physiological parameters of the vineyard, such as vegetative growth, nutritional status and grape composition. This unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is deployed with the aim of providing fast and accurate information to grape growers in order to optimize vineyard management and to improve grapes and composition and quality of wines. The integral monitoring of the vineyard over the entire season is intended, by placing the ground robot along the vineyards. The robot will incorporate an integrated sensing system that includes machine vision, fluorescence-based sensors and NIR spectroscopy devices. Canopy and fruit images and sensor data will be acquired on-the-go and processed in real time through customized map-building algorithms, displaying final maps in smart phones and other devices by grape growers and other end-users. Precision viticulture will capitalize from the scouting robot capabilities of not only being endowed with several non-invasive techniques to sense and assess crop status, but also with key data to allow for vineyard management, decision-making and forecasting solutions.