Title
Kriging‐based robotic exploration for soil moisture mapping using a cosmic‐ray sensor
Abstract
Soil moisture monitoring is a fundamental process to enhance agricultural outcomes and to protect the environment. The traditional methods for measuring moisture content in the soil are laborious and expensive, and therefore there is a growing interest in developing sensors and technologies which can reduce the effort and costs. In this work, we propose to use an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a state-of-the-art noncontact soil moisture sensor building moisture maps on the fly and automatically selecting the most optimal sampling locations. We introduce an autonomous exploration strategy driven by the quality of the soil moisture model indicating areas of the field where the information is less precise. The sensor model follows the Poisson distribution and we demonstrate how to integrate such measurements into the kriging framework. We also investigate a range of different exploration strategies and assess their usefulness through a set of evaluation experiments based on real soil moisture data collected from two different fields. We demonstrate the benefits of using the adaptive measurement interval and adaptive sampling strategies for building better quality soil moisture models. The presented method is general and can be applied to other scenarios where the measured phenomena directly affect the acquisition time and need to be spatially mapped.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1002/rob.21914
JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
agriculture,environmental monitoring,exploration,terrestrial robotics
Kriging,Moisture,Adaptive sampling,Simulation,Remote sensing,Sampling (statistics),Water content,Soil moisture sensor,Engineering,Mobile robot,Environmental monitoring
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37.0
1.0
1556-4959
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jaime Pulido1636.23
Amir Badiee200.34
Tom Duckett390777.62
Jonathan Evans400.34
Simon Pearson5316.06
Grzegorz Cielniak631634.34