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Site-specific Management For Biomass Feedstock Production: Development Of Remote Sensing Data Acquisition Systems
1T. Ahamed, 2L. Tian, 2Y. Zhang, 2Y. Xiong, 2B. Zhao, 2Y. Jiang, 2K. Ting
1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapaign

Efficient biomass feedstock production supply chain spans from site-specific management of crops on field to the gate of biorefinery. Remote sensing data acquisition systems have been introduced for site-specific management, which is a part of the engineering solutions for biomass feedstock production. A stand alone tower remote sensing platform was developed to monitor energy crops using multispectral imagery. The sensing system was capable of collecting RGB and CIR images during the crop growing season and transferring the images through a wireless network. A Lab View-based control algorithm has been developed to control the camera gain and exposure time under different illumination conditions. In addition, the horizontal and vertical rotation of pan tilt is controlled from a remote computer using a wireless network. A digital compass was installed with this system to get yaw and pitch orientations of the camera. A Reconfigurable Data Acquisition Vehicle (R-DAV) has been built for crop close proximity measurements using a hyper-spectral camera and plant sample acquisitions. The vehicle employs a 4-wheel-drive-4-wheel-steering locomotion mechanism, and the vertical clearance is adjustable from 3 m to 4 m in responding to the different heights of various energy crops. The high spectral, spatial, and temporal resolutions from real-time image acquisitions are the advantages as compared to aerial and satellite imagery. The goal of this research is to explore the optimum harvest window for quality assurance of different biomass feedstock. Therefore, the experimental field has been laid out for monitoring Corn, Miscanthus, Switch grass, and Prairie grass simultaneously. N rate, K level, water stress, biomass yield, and energy content of each crop were compared using the remote sensing system. In addition, an Unmanned Aerail Vehicle (UAV) has been selected to capture images from low altitude to cover a wide range of fields on the biomass feedstock production farm.

Keyword: Energy Crops; Stand-alone Remote Sensing, Ground Reference Sensing, UAV Image Sensing, Biomass Yield