IPM 2.0 - The role of AI and robots in the success

Added on 10 February 2022

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IPM 2.0 - The role of AI and robots in the success

Since the 1950s, the concept of integrated pest management (IPM) has revolved around defining acceptable levels of pests and diseases and preventative cultural practices. Typically, this has involved extensive monitoring and manual record-keeping, mechanical and biological control of pests and diseases and, if necessary, responsible use of pesticides, preferably in limited areas. This core philosophy is still relevant today but since the 1950s, the size of operations has changed dramatically and with that, the size of the problem.

There was a time when we had fewer greenhouses and enough people to manage them, but the number of greenhouses globally has increased yet the human resources did not increase at the same rate. In these operations, knowledgeable humans cannot be everywhere at once and things can get out of hand. Couple that with limitations posed by easily spread plant viruses such as the tomato brown rugrose virus (ToBRFV) or pests such as thrips, plus the global pandemic, access to plants and farms is even more limited now than it was a few years ago.

This is where technology to manage pest outbreaks in your greenhouse can help.

Over the past two decades, robots and automation, and more recently artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, have entered farms and greenhouses. While some areas have fully embraced these technologies (i.e., sorting machines based on computer vision, automatic trollies, climate computers, irrigation management) some areas are still in their early stages of research and development (e.g. robots for harvesting, de-leafing robots and plant lowering).

The IPM related technologies are more mature in comparison. As many know, monitoring is essential for IPM success, and many applications can now digitize (store written observations to a computer database) human observations on the ground. The conventional practice consists of scouts walking the crop, recording their location, and jotting down what they see on a piece of paper or simply memorizing them and discussing with their managers.

How can I use technology to store and analyse pest activity in my greenhouse?

At a minimum, pest monitoring applications use phones or tablets to record and digitize human observations. Some allow the user to snap and save a picture along with their notes. These apps can create a digital archive of human observations, and their records can be used to generate historical trends. They can facilitate some administrative aspects of IPM record-keeping, but these applications entirely rely on human input.

The second tier of monitoring technologies consists of sensors and cameras that passively or actively collect information from the crops to determine the health of the plants. These technologies range from high-resolution visible RGB to thermal, infra-red, multispectral, hyperspectral and UV cameras, as well as climate, chemical, and electrophysiological sensors. The sensory data and imaging information is usually coupled with a machine learning/AI engine that either flags anomalies in the data sets or detects specific patterns or objects. Some of these platforms capture the data and send it to the cloud for further analytics and some use edge computing (data processed live on a chip) based on CPU or GPU to provide real-time analytics.

All these technologies require extensive training and a model monitoring platform to ensure their accuracy and performance are maintained. These cloud-based systems must address connectivity and bandwidth available on the farm as well as data security and privacy matters.

(This article also appears in the February 2022 issue of Greenhouse Canada magazine. https://www.greenhousecanada.com/digital-edition/ )