Farm Monitoring System with Drones and Optical Camera Communication

Drones have been attracting significant attention in the field of agriculture. They can be used for various tasks such as spraying pesticides, monitoring pests, and assessing crop growth. Sensors are also widely used in agriculture to monitor environmental parameters such as soil moisture and temperature. Due to the high cost of communication infrastructure and radio-wave modules, the adoption of high-density sensing systems in agriculture is limited. To address this issue, we propose an agricultural sensor network system using drones and Optical Camera Communication (OCC). The idea is to transmit sensor data from LED panels mounted on sensor nodes and receive the data using a drone-mounted camera. This enables high-density sensing at low cost and can be deployed in areas with underdeveloped infrastructure and radio silence. We propose a trajectory control algorithm for the receiving drone to efficiently collect the sensor data. From computer simulations, we confirmed that the proposed algorithm reduces total flight time by $30\%$ compared to a shortest-path algorithm. We also conducted a preliminary experiment at a leaf mustard farm in Kamitonda-cho, Wakayama, Japan, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. We collected 5178 images of LED panels with a drone-mounted camera to train YOLOv5 for object detection. With simple On–Off Keying (OOK) modulation, we achieved sufficiently low bit error rates (BERs) under ${10}^{-3}$ in the real-world environment. The experimental results show that the proposed system is applicable for drone-based sensor data collection in agriculture.