Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
(N/A)
LINCOLN,NE 68583
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The goal is to design, develop, and deploy new digital twin systems in regard to crop growth modeling for smart irrigation management. We propose the CropTwin system with three core research tasks, including cost-efficient IoT systems, automatic digital twining, and smart irrigation solutions. We deploy and evaluate CropTwin in the real-world research farm at UNL, throughout a full soybean growth session.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
100%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
The goal is to design, develop, and deploy new digital twin systems regarding crop growth modeling for smart irrigation management.The long-term goalis to design applied digital twin systems for a wide range of agriculture scenarios, including but not limited to crop growth, insect control, vertical farming, and livestock management.This interdisciplinary team is devoted to addressing real-world technical challenges in agriculture digital twins, in terms of computation complexity, cost efficiency, and robustness, toward near-future farm deployment.The success of this project will enable us to take the first step in investigating agriculture digital twins in Nebraska, Midwest, and Beyond.
Project Methods
The fundamental idea of CropTwin is multi-fold.First, we develop a cost-efficient IoT system with limited sensors to collect raw sensory data with private 5G networks. We design new deep learning models to extract and predict more environment and crop parameters beyond limited raw data.Second,we design an automatic digital twining for crop growth with the assured attribute of fidelity (i.e., minimized model-to-reality gap) and synchronicity (i.e., day-to-day update).This is achieved by integrating existing AquaCrop simulator (which embeds solid domain knowledge) and advanced contextual deep learning (which learns to understand environment context).Third, we design new smart irrigation solutions uniquely enabled by CropTwin, towards water conservation and yield improvement.Fourth, we deploy and evaluate CropTwin in the real-world research farm at UNL, throughout a full soybean growth session.