Blooming business



Within the blooming business project Avular developed together with ADI an autonomous greenhouse monitoring drone system. The drone system consists of Avular’s Vertex drone platform equipped with the Avular Starling indoor positioning system and a high-resolution camera that runs ADI’s AI algorithms.
To facilitate navigation inside the greenhouse, Avular has installed their proprietary Starling beacons in the greenhouses, which allows the drone to accurately retrieve its 6 degrees-of-freedom pose in the environment. With accurate 6-DOF position the drone can fly autonomously through the greenhouse and to collect image data of the plants. These images are subsequently analyzed by the artificial intelligence algorithms from ADI to identify crop growth stages and plant diseases.

Flying inside greenhouses is challenging. Flying a drone indoors is in any case challenging given the absence of the GPS for X,Y positioning, which makes that a dedicated indoor positioning system is needed to provide the drone with the required positioning information for autonomous flight. Avular evaluated multiple indoor positioning systems for their respective feasible in greenhouses. Off-the-shelf systems like Ultra-Wide-Band did not provide the required accuracy given the challenging nature of the environment. Avular’s Starling system, an optical infrared beacon-based system, was also evaluated and performed very well in terms of accuracy but also seems to be the more viable option economically. Avular implemented the system in the greenhouse and proved the performance for indoor drone flight in greenhouses.
In turn, ADI has developed the artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze the visual data acquired by the drone. To do so, the AI was trained to recognize healthy and unhealthy plants. This was done by feeding the AI a large quantity of training pictures of healthy plants and plants that are infected with the top-5 plant diseases.
In the future, the functionalities of this autonomous monitoring system can be extended by gathering more types of data or by equipping the drone with end effectors that allow precision farming. Together with ADI, Avular will evaluate the next steps in bringing this innovation to the market.
Driven by Challenges has made a video about the project, including an interview (in Dutch). Watch it below: