Automatic crop registration and automatic IPM scouting have been added to ecoation's OKO 360 camera capabilities. The OKO, equipped with an embedded GPU similar to what's used in self-driving cars, has been trained for the past 2 years in greenhouses across Canada, Mexico, and Europe. With an edge-based universal model, the ecoation 360 camera can perform a variety of image processing tasks. These tasks include but are not limited to counting flowers, trusses, plant heads, the number of fruits, assessing their color and ripeness, and measuring the leaf area index. The camera can also detect pest and disease-related symptoms on the foliage of crops and calculate the percentage of foliage with health issues. So far, the system has been exposed to thrips, aphids, spider mites, whiteflies, loopers, and powdery mildew.
"The challenge we faced was measuring a large number of metrics on a large number of plants while moving at a high speed. Ecoation's approach is to provide a larger sample size compared to what humans do manually on a handful of plants to provide a better representation of the crop's status," said Dr. Saber Miresmailli, CEO and Founder of Ecoation. He further added, "You can use a fixed camera that you mount on a pole or a post, but that camera only provides a subsample and a snapshot of your operation. With the geo-aware OKO, you can roam around your operation, and as you move and record your observations manually, the camera and climate sensors automatically capture a significantly larger amount of data and process it live on the GPU."
The OKO platform is a collaborative robot. Mounted on most major brands of greenhouse carts, the user can enter various observations manually through the interactive LCD of the system as they drive down the rows. The rest of the system automatically collects information, and as the OKO is driven out of the row, the human observations, along with the automatic machine measurements, are transmitted and displayed on a web portal where growers and owners can see reports and more advanced analytics.
"The most common question we receive is how accurate this system is and what else it can detect?" Miresmailli mentioned. "The simple answer is: it depends on how you use it. This is a camera system with an embedded image-processing model in its brain. If you follow our instructions and drive it at the right height (it is not affected by speed) and at the right time of the day, it can take high-quality pictures. If an object of interest appears in the image, the model can detect it, or it can be further trained to detect it. It is a system that gets better every day, and the more you use it, the better it gets."
All existing ecoation customers who have the OKO with a 360 camera will receive these capabilities as a free upgrade to their system. Ecoation also introduced ROYA, the fully autonomous scouting robot that does not require a human driver. This robot has been on display at the HORTECA center in Kingsville. The first fully autonomous ROYA will be released commercially in a few weeks in Ontario, Canada.
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