SAMSON

The aim of the SAMSON joint project (other partners: Fraunhofer IFAM, TUHH, HS21 is to provide sustainable support for fruit-growing agriculture, which has strong regional roots. The focus of the project is on irrigation and plant protection and aims to enable savings in operating resources such as diesel, pesticides and water through the use of smart measurement technology and intelligent evaluation algorithms. This goal is to be achieved by rethinking established cultivation methods, which are based on expert knowledge and many years of non-quantifiable experience. The limited ability to record the complex factors influencing crop quantity and quality, such as climate, previous year's yield, flowering progress, etc., cannot be monitored in detail by the producer and therefore leads to generalized treatments of the entire cultivation area with plant protection products instead of acting selectively. With the approach of a multi-sensor image acquisition system, all fruit trees and cultivation areas can be automatically recorded and cataloged. The image and sensor data can provide information on plant parameters (growth, fruit and flower numbers, treatments carried out) throughout the season and can be saved for years and analyzed with the help of AI algorithms, allowing more relevant recommendations for action to be derived for specific sub-areas and trees.   With the help of autonomous robotics, the trees can be treated individually. The collection of data in a central interactive farm management system also provides an interface for integrating high-resolution weather data from distributed stations, which allows frost protection irrigation to be used on a site-specific basis, thus saving water. Through networking and cooperation between the project partners and local partners and fruit growers, the acquired research knowledge can be passed on to interested parties in the be passed on to interested parties.

Project website: www.samson-projekt.de