PANTHEON: SCADA for Precision Agriculture

In this chapter, we introduce the vision of the H2020 project ``Precision Farming of Hazelnut Orchards'' (PANTHEON), which is to develop the agricultural equivalent of an industrial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to be used for precision farming of orchards. PANTHEON's objective is to design an integrated system where a relatively limited number of heterogeneous unmanned robotic components (including terrestrial and aerial robots) move within the orchard to collect data and perform typical farming operations. In addition, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) agrometeorological solar-powered network is deployed to continuously monitor the environmental conditions of the orchard. The information so collected is then stored in a central operative unit that integrates the data to perform automatic feedback actions (e.g., to regulate the irrigation system) and to support the decisions of the agronomists and farmers in charge of the orchard. The proposed SCADA system will acquire information at the resolution of the individual plant, to drastically increase, compared to current best practices, the detection of possible limiting factors at the level of the individual plant and to react accordingly. Differently from the current state of the art in precision farming for large-scale orchards, the capability of monitoring the state and the evolution of each single tree will be the enabling technology to allow more focused interventions. This will lead to a better average health of the orchard and to an increased effectiveness of integrated pest management (IPM) activities. In conclusion, the ongoing implemented architecture has the potential to increase production while, at the same time, being more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. To summarize, we believe that the proposed SCADA paradigm for Precision Agriculture may represent an attractive opportunity for the design of a novel real-time software architecture. In other words, by allowing the processing of massive amounts of datasets derived from the SCADA architecture, it will be possible to step up the current effectiveness of Precision Agriculture (PA) methodologies by providing real-time answers to the questions posed by farm managers, when in need of timely decisions.