1st GreenWaterDrone General Pilot Testing

1st GreenWaterDrone General Pilot Testing

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Press release

On November 5th and 6th 2020, the Green Water Drone project (www.greenwaterdrone.eu) carried out a general pilot test of its technologies and services, in selected fields at the area of Trifylia, Messenia, with the assistance of “DIRECTORATE OF RURAL ECONOMY AND VETERINARY” (DAOK) of Trifylia and local producers.

The process began with a review of the areas to ensure compliance with the safety rules laid down for the drones flight on Thursday November 5th, while at the same time the appropriate fields for the pilot's test were selected.

On Friday, November 6th, the test operation was completed with the execution of the main part of the procedure, which was attended by the Director of “DIRECTORATE OF RURAL ECONOMY AND VETERINARY” (DAOK) of Trifylia, Mr. Antonis Paraskevopoulos, as well as project teams of all the technological partners of the project (Agricultural University of Athens, ALTUS LSA, CITE and University of Peloponnese).

Under the guidance of the Scientific Officer of the project, Prof. Mr. Alexander Stavrou (AUA), a series of flights were carried out by ALTUS LSA with specially equipped for the needs of the multi-cutter project which were programmed for automatic flight over the areas of interest and through which measurements were collected, photographic material (visual, Thermal and multispectrmatic) and crop videos. These kinds of data are used for several specific functions and services for the Green Water Drone project, such as the calculation of the water stress index (CWSI) and the irrigation of the crops, as well the surveillance of the crops. Green Water Drone's specialized software, which is mainly developed by CITE the main coordinator of the project, was represented by the CRIO of CITE, Mr. Georgios Kakaletris. CITE supported the process from uploading the collected data to automatically sending irrigation notifications to final users, after performing the planned calculations, by using the Index CWSI. The process of flights, collecting and uploading of data has been coordinated, based on a control and evaluation plan, by the responsible partner for the requirements and architecture of the system, etc., Mr. Panos Filipopoulos., professor of University of Peloponnese. At the same time, a group of partners from the Agricultural University of Athens collected several additional data at focused points of interest and checked the status of the micro-meteorological ground stations.

The results of the pilot tests, together with the evaluation by producers and other categories of potential users of the system, will be analyzed by the members of the project team coordinated by the University of Peloponnese and the business plan Consultant in order to develop the final business perspective (model) of the system.

The process will be repeated next spring to gather enough data to evaluate and improve the technologies and services supported by GreenWaterDrone.

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Figure 1: Members of UoP project team (Prof. P. Filippopoulos and K. Koutrakis) and GPA (E. Psomiadis) with the Director of the “DIRECTORATE OF RURAL ECONOMY AND VETERINARY” (DAOK) Trifylia Mr. A. Paraskevopoulos

 

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Figure 2: Supervision of a ground measurement station by the project team

 

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Figure 3: UAV exceeds crop load suitable for infrared foliage temperature measurements

 

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Figure 4: Preparation of a UAV flight by the Altus LSA technical team

 

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Figure 5: On-site uploading of data to GreenWaterDrone applications by CITE

 

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Figure 6: The success of the project is based on the support of the “DIRECTORATE OF RURAL ECONOMY AND VETERINARY” DAOK Trifylia, which ensures the cooperation of local producers

 

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Figure 7: On-site crop measurements by the AUA team