Autonomous Agricultural Monitoring with Aerial Drones and RF Energy-Harvesting Sensor Tags

In precision agriculture and plant science, there is an increasing demand for wireless sensors that are easy to deploy, maintain, and monitor. This paper investigates a novel approach that leverages recent advances in extremely low-power wireless communication and sensing, as well as the rapidly increasing availability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. By mounting a specialized wireless payload on a UAV, battery-less sensor tags can harvest wireless beacon signals emitted from the drone, dramatically reducing the cost per sensor. These tags can measure environmental information such as temperature and humidity, then encrypt and transmit the data in the range of several meters. An experimental implementation was constructed at AERPAW, an NSF-funded wireless aerial drone research platform. While ground-based tests confirmed reliable sensor operation and data collection, airborne trials encountered wireless interference that impeded successfully detecting tag data. Despite these challenges, our results suggest further refinements could improve reliability and advance precision agriculture and agrarian research.