Animals are fitted with sensor-equipped collars that collect information regarding their location, direction, and average speed (geolocation, acceleration, gyro sensors)
Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) beacons Typical uses: Warehouses: Automatic inventory of assets Indoor positioning: Tracking assets’ location automatically
Camera types used on agrobots: – RGB cameras – extensively used in agricultural machine vision applications for fruit/plant detection, yield prediction, segmentation tasks, disease detection, ripeness detection, weed detection and insects detection – Hyperspectral, thermal, or ultrasonic cameras – typically provide better results than conventional RGB color images – Stereoscopic cameras – provides 3D plant structure information (dimension of crops (depth information, crop height, leaf shape, leaf area etc.)) Critical factor is the camera’s resolution, which should be high enough to capture the details of the scene especially in the cases of insect and disease detection.
Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD) Sensors: These are widely used in oceanography. CTD sensors measure conductivity (to infer salinity), temperature, and depth simultaneously, providing comprehensive data essential for climate change studies.
Digital Temperature Sensors: Placed in various parts of a rainforest, these sensors can provide detailed temperature data, helping to detect and analyze sudden temperature variations.
Fiber-optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) systems and pressure gauges enable critical monitoring during exploration and energy production for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). These sensors can be used to: – Estimate production potential in or between new wells by measuring the distributed temperature and the point pressure, or pressure measured at the bottom of the well. These measurements allow the calculation of reservoir size, flow resistance between wells (if multiple wells are instrumented), well bore damage caused by drilling, effectiveness of the fracturing operations, and well completion. – Monitor surface and subsurface scale buildup and chemical clean-up. Scale, a mineral residue precipitated from geothermal fluid in response to changes in water pressure and temperature, builds up on pipe walls and will, over time, form a thick, insulating layer that limits flow and may block a pipe. Chemicals are injected into the pipe to remove the accumulated scale. By understanding severity of the scaling, operators can better consider what mitigation options are most suitable as well as minimize the use of expensive chemicals. – Provide permanent monitoring of injector and producer wells to allow identification of the specific zones and fractures that produce fluids. – Perform integrity monitoring for casing and tubing leaks to avoid contaminating ground water and subsurface aquifers.
For habitat environment observation, monitoring sensors such as temperature, humidity, height, wind, light, and cameras are used
GPS for autonomous navigation in open-field cultivation environments Robotic data collection platform equipped with RADAR, liDAR, ultrasonic radar sensors, spectrometers, fluorometers
Infrared Thermal Imaging: Used to map urban heat islands from a distance, often from airborne platforms or satellites. Networks of Digital Temperature Sensors: Deployed across different urban areas, these sensors can provide granular temperature data, highlighting variations within a city. Weather Stations: Often used in urban settings, weather stations can provide comprehensive environmental data, including temperature, which is crucial for studying urban heat island effects.
Parking sensors (Infrared, Passive Infrared(PIR)) and Ultrasonic Vehicle Detection Sensors – Individual parking space sensors that gather and transmits information for management, payment and compliance monitoring
Pest control sensors on traps that provide accurate information on trap status, whether armed, unarmed, or armed without a catch.
Portable waste bin or portable toilets enabled with GNSS. Once data related to fill rates and temperatures of smart bins /toilets are collected, the sensors relay the exact location and other waste related information of the bins in question so waste management can send out SMSes to nearby garbage collectors to do the needed collection/emptying before harmful carbon emissions are released.
Rain Gauges: Modern rain gauges often come equipped with wireless communication capabilities, allowing them to transmit data on rainfall amounts to monitoring centers in real time. Stream Gauges: Many stream gauges are designed to wirelessly transmit data on water levels and flow rates, providing crucial information for flood forecasting.Soil Moisture Sensors: These sensors can be equipped with wireless communication to send soil moisture data to a central system, which helps in assessing the risk of flooding, especially in areas prone to flash floods. Pressure Transducers: Used in various water bodies, these sensors can wirelessly transmit water pressure data, which is then used to calculate water levels. Ultrasonic Sensors: These can be set up to measure water levels and then transmit the data wirelessly to a central monitoring system. Anemometers: Modern anemometers can send wind data wirelessly to meteorological centers, contributing to broader weather pattern analysis for flood prediction. Tide Gauges: In coastal areas, tide gauges equipped with wireless communication capabilities transmit sea level data, which is crucial for predicting storm surges and coastal floods.
RFID Readers: E.g., Handheld Typical uses: Warehouses: Tracking assets that are packaged or inside a container Hospitals: Tracking asset locations automatically within a limited distance range
Satellites: Geostationary and polar-orbiting weather satellites are equipped with advanced sensors to monitor wind patterns at high altitudes globally. They are particularly useful for tracking large-scale weather systems and providing data for flight path planning over remote areas like oceans. Satellite sensors that track high-altitude wind speeds can range from those capturing basic wind vector data to more complex imaging systems.
Seismic sensors used for monitoring of seismic activity in geothermal plants can enhance the safety aspect of power generation. Geothermal power plants are generally located near earthquake-prone zones and the ability to manage such power plants remotely is useful for employee safety. Vibration and temperature sensors are used in turbines and generators to monitor temperatures and detect vibrations.
Smart meters that collect granular real-time data across the water grid, LED light sensors to monitor water levels in tanks, pH sensors, temperature sensors and turbidity sensors in pipelines and storage and distribution tanks, volume sensor
Smart Waste Bin with wireless ultrasonic fill-level sensors and other indicators such as temperature and tilt within waste container
soil moisture sensors – used to assess the water level in the soil temperature and humidity sensors – used to monitor the environment, which had a direct influence on the water level of the soil
Tag sensors and readers for tracking people, collecting environmental data, equipment tracking, and real-time alerts. RFID transmitter devices are mounted on headlamps belts or badge cards of miners to enable tracking of workers in real-time.
The rodent sensors are placed in the high rodent-activity areas for inspection. When rodents pass through the location, infrared sensors trigger notification to all the relevant parties such as owner and pest management service about the rodent activity so that they can decide a plan of action of elimination.
Types of sensors: Remote metering, Cathodic protection, Gas density, Pipeline pressure, Custody transfer flow meters, Fire / Gas / H2S alarms, Tank levels, Tank batteries, Temperature sensors, Control valves, Flow monitoring, Electricity consumption, Structural health & deformation, Air pollution
Vibration sensors such as low-frequency accelerometers are mounted on the casing of the turbine and generator near the bearings and shaft. Water quality sensors (Dissolved Oxygen (DO) Sensor)
Wearables equipped with a variety of sensors including 3 axis accelerometer, Gyroscope, Altimeter, Temperature sensor, Bioimpedance sensor, optical sensor, GNSS
Wind Sensors (Anemometers): measure wind speed and direction, key factors in sandstorm formation. By understanding wind patterns, it becomes easier to predict the movement and intensity of sandstorms.
Wireless Z-Traps are devices used to catch pests around the plants using pheromone lure. Pest count information is wirelessly passed along from up to 1 km away using a base station to the online cloud service. This information is used to study and determine where and how much pesticides will be required. Imagery sensors capture imagery data to identify the diseases in plants – RGB sensors – have three colour channels, i.e., red, green and blue, which can be used to perceive the biometric effect in the plants – fluorescence Imagery sensors – used to distinguish the photosynthetic activities in the plants – spectral sensors – capture images containing the spatial information of objects in multiple wavebands, used to analyse crops’ health and pest attack – thermal sensors – used to measure the water status in the plant by measuring the temperature Weather condition monitoring sensors, i.e., temperature, dew, humidity and wind speed, are used to monitor weather parameters to find a correlation between pest growth with weather
