A New Early Warning Pest Monitoring System
LEAN Systems and its technology partner, Proxilogica, have announced the pre-production testing of their latest technology in collaboration with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) at the Lethbridge Research Development Center (LeRDC).
The Firefly is a wireless and self-powered IoT imager the size of a credit card, purpose-built for early detection of disease and pest outbreaks in the horticulture industry.
The LEAN/Proxilogica team has worked in collaboration with AAFC-LeRDC for almost two years to explore economical digital imaging systems for indoor plant phenotyping pursuant to a three-year material development agreement.
Dr. Anne Smith, a research scientist at LeRDC, together with her colleagues Drs. Jonathan Neilson and Charles Geddes, has been developing inexpensive imaging platforms for digital image capture and image analysis protocols for plant phenotyping in growth rooms, greenhouses, and laboratories. Drs. Smith and Neilson, over the last two years, have been collaborating with LEAN Systems to test their technology. The early systems, which were installed less than one month prior to reducing on-site presence in response to COVID-19 restrictions, showed:
- Effective image capture over greenhouse plants
- The ability to upload images remotely to a central server
- Provide regular downloadable images to the user
- Apply image analysis protocols to automatically extract information on plant growth over time
AAFC is excited to continue working with LEAN Systems on the Firefly technology for automated image capture and extraction of plant phenotyping information relevant to rapid assessment of new varieties, the impacts of abiotic and biotic stresses, and for screening herbicide resistance in a variety of weed species.
Dr. David Southwell, CEO of Proxilogica Corporation, says behind the Firefly architecture are large fleets of tiny imagers that maximize space coverage with enough on-board intelligence to pre-process and securely transmit data to the cloud where bird’s eye maps are then assembled. AI-boosted analytics functions may be performed at both edge and core, drastically reducing network traffic thereby enabling fleet scaling.
“We are very excited about this technology and see the opportunity for a range of strategic B2B relationships to accelerate commercial evaluation and deployment as well as additional initiatives with research partners globally to expand the Firefly’s useful purpose” says Bill Halina, Managing Director of LEAN Systems.
Subscribe to eNewsletter
