Software and Hardware Architectures in Cooperative Aerial and Ground Robots for Agricultural Disease Detection

Currently, disease detection tasks performed on strawberry crops are conducted by human scouts. This qualitative approach is susceptible to error and relies on the visibility of symptoms which are discernable only after the disease has progressed to a certain stage. Precision agriculture is a thriving new discipline that promises to integrate new autonomous machine technology with agronomy. In this research, the cooperation of dedicated ground and aerial vehicles is proposed to undertake the challenging task of early stage disease detection for commercial farms. The focus of this paper is the architectures of the communication, software, and hardware in such a network.