Towards Efficient and Secure Agricultural Information Collection Using a Multi-Robot System

This is an NSF-sponsored project (#1932300) on Secure Precision Agriculture (March 2020 – February 2023).


With the growing world population and diminishing agricultural lands, it becomes imperative to maximize crop yield by protecting crop health and mitigating against pests and diseases. Though there are decades-old practices still in place, there is also growing adoption of so-called precision agriculture solutions, which employ emerging technologies in sensing, automation, and analytics in daily farmland operations. As farmers gain real-time access to critical data (e.g., land and weather conditions) and can quickly share any untoward findings with others, farmland operations are morphing into full-fledged cyber-physical systems. To this end, this project seeks to develop, implement and evaluate a multi-robot agricultural information collection system that is autonomous, efficient, and secure.

Principal Investigators
Dr. Ayan Dutta (UNF)Dr. Swapnoneel Roy (UNF)Dr. Patrick Kreidl (UNF)Dr. Ladislau Bölöni (UCF)

Students

Tamim Samman (MS @ UNF)César Castellón (MS @ UNF)Iliya Kulbaka (MS @ UNF)Samuel Matloob (Ph.D. @ UCF)

Publications

Journal Articles

  1. Cesar Castellon, Swapnoneel Roy, O. Patrick Kreidl, Ayan Dutta, Ladislau Boloni, “Towards a Green Blockchain: Engineering Merkle Tree and Proof of Work for Energy Optimization”, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022.
  2. Ayan Dutta, Swapnoneel Roy, O. Patrick Kreidl, Ladislau Boloni, “Multi-robot Information Gathering for Precision Agriculture: Current State, Scope, and Challenges”, IEEE Access, 2021.

Conference papers

  1. Ayan Dutta, O. Patrick Kreidl, and Jason O’Kane, “Opportunistic Multi-robot Environmental Sampling via Decentralized Markov Decision Processes”, 15th International Symposium On Distributed Autonomous Robotics Systems (DARS), 2021.
  2. Swapnoneel Roy, Cesar Castellon, Patrick Kreidl, Ayan Dutta, Ladislau Boloni, “Energy Efficient Merkle Trees for Blockchains”, 20th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2021.
    Acceptance rate: ~30%
  3. Tuffa Said, Jeffery Wolbert, Siavash Khodadadeh, Ayan Dutta, O. Patrick Kreidl, Ladislau Boloni, Swapnoneel Roy, “Multi-robot Information Sampling Using Deep Mean Field Reinforcement Learning”, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2021.
  4. Tamim Samman, James Spearman, Ayan Dutta, O. Patrick Kreidl, Swapnoneel Roy, Ladislau Boloni, “Secure Multi-robot Adaptive Information Sampling”, IEEE International Conference on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), 2021.
  5. Tamim Samman, Ayan Dutta, O. Patrick Kreidl, Swapnoneel Roy, Ladislau Boloni, “Secure Multi-robot Adaptive Information Sampling”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.
  6. Cesar Castellon, Swapnoneel Roy, O. Patrick Kreidl, Ayan Dutta, Ladislau Boloni, “Towards an Energy-Efficient Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC)”, 13th International Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (IGSCC), 2022.

Abstracts/Posters

  1. M. Pugliese, A. Flowers, M. Tapia, and O.P. Kreidl, “Garduino: Using Image Processing in Matlab to detect health in plants,” Annual Conference of the National Council on Undergraduate Research (NCUR2021), Apr 2021.

Contact

Dr. Ayan Dutta (Email: a dot dutta at unf dot edu)

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