Digital Twin of Drone-based Protection of Agricultural Areas

Protecting agricultural fields, like crops, vineyards, and husbandry areas, has been a difficult challenge since historical times. Classical methods to prevent intrusion are often destructive to wild and domestic animals alike. Even more current nondestructive systems, like camera-based systems are attributed to specific problems related to environmental or technological issues. Furthermore, verifying the effectiveness of installed systems is difficult, as the triggering situations are unmanageable and typically occur unsupervised. This paper presents a complex vision-based intrusion detection system to overcome these problems and further proposes more extensive control and flexibility on the development process. The solution provides a workflow integrating Digital Reality methods into the system development by creating a digital twin of the drone and its surrounding environment in a general-purpose robotic simulator. With this simulation, the triggering events and environmental effects can be easily emulated, such as a wild animal entering the area of interest. The solution also focuses on incorporating new 5G info-communication networks on handling communication between the intrusion detection system and the base station in a distributed manner.