Foundation Projects

This project developed proof of concept ideas for providing Internet availability to efficiently assist beehive management in natural beekeeping in rural and remote areas, where the Internet is unserved. The system includes several IoT devices located at beehives, which connect to a drone through LoRa wireless communications. Periodically, a drone flies on preprogrammed trajectories to collect data from IoT devices. The system is expected to helpfully support beekeepers with sufficient information for hive remote management without human intervention.

The project implemented and configured a programmable drone equipped with a Raspberry Pi board. The drone works properly and can connect with IoT devices through built-in and external WiFi connections. In addition, the project developed an optimal trajectory algorithm for the drone to minimize the mission time by using adaptive clustering and deep reinforcement learning methods. To prove the applicability and performance of the proposed solution, the project set up a simulation environment consisting of a drone and numerous IoT devices, which are randomly distributed on the ground. The drone departs from a predefined station and takes a round trip to collect data from all IoT devices, then comes back to arrive at the station. The simulation results illustrated the outperformance of the solution compared to several existing approaches.