Cloud-based Decision Support and Automation for Precision Agriculture in Orchards

Recent technological and commercial developments make cloud computing an affordable, scalable, and highly-available platform technology. Meanwhile, precision agriculture is showing its potentials by improving agricultural operations through better data-driven decision making. Nevertheless, further development of precision agriculture requires better technology and tools to process data efficiently at a reasonable cost, and to translate the data to better decisions and actions in a field. We developed a framework for cloud-based Decision Support and Automation systems that can acquire data from various sources, synthesize application-specific decisions, and control field devices from the Cloud. A distinctive feature of our framework is its extensible software architecture: decision modules can be added and/or configured for a specific operation. The platform features a device-agnostic frontend that can process incoming data in different formats and semantics. Finally, the platform incorporates software-defined control, a new software design paradigm we proposed to enable versatile and safe control of field devices from a cloud computing platform. An early version of the system has been developed and tested with support from the USDA. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.