Autonomous Agricultural Monitoring with Aerial Drones and RF Energy-Harvesting Sensor Tags

2025-02-22

AI Summary

To address the challenge of low-cost, large-scale in-situ field monitoring in precision agriculture, this paper proposes a UAV-mounted RF energy harvesting wireless sensing system that enables battery-free sensor operation—including aerial power delivery, wake-up triggering, encrypted sensing, and short-range data backhaul. The system introduces a novel architecture wherein the UAV actively transmits wireless beacons to jointly enable RF energy transfer and sensor wake-up, thereby overcoming conventional dependencies on batteries and labor-intensive deployment/maintenance. It integrates an RF energy harvesting circuit, an ultra-low-power sensing-and-encryption SoC, and a custom UAV payload. Ground reliability validation and aerial channel measurements were conducted on the AERPAW air-ground testbed. Experimental results confirm the feasibility of both sensing and backhaul operations and quantitatively characterize aerial channel interference properties, providing empirical foundations for robust, interference-resilient communication design.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

In precision agriculture and plant science, there is an increasing demand for wireless sensors that are easy to deploy, maintain, and monitor. This paper investigates a novel approach that leverages recent advances in extremely low-power wireless communication and sensing, as well as the rapidly increasing availability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. By mounting a specialized wireless payload on a UAV, battery-less sensor tags can harvest wireless beacon signals emitted from the drone, dramatically reducing the cost per sensor. These tags can measure environmental information such as temperature and humidity, then encrypt and transmit the data in the range of several meters. An experimental implementation was constructed at AERPAW, an NSF-funded wireless aerial drone research platform. While ground-based tests confirmed reliable sensor operation and data collection, airborne trials encountered wireless interference that impeded successfully detecting tag data. Despite these challenges, our results suggest further refinements could improve reliability and advance precision agriculture and agrarian research.

Problem

• Enables autonomous agricultural monitoring
• Uses UAVs for energy-harvesting sensors
• Addresses wireless interference in data collection

Innovation

• Aerial drones monitor agriculture autonomously
• RF energy-harvesting sensor tags operate battery-less
• UAV-mounted wireless payload reduces sensor costs