A Holistic Approach to Sustainable, Digital EU Agriculture, Forestry, Livestock and Rural Development based on Reconfigurable Aerial Enablers and Edge Artificial Intelligence-on-Demand Systems

July 2022 - June 2025

Chameleon

https://chameleon-heu.eu

CHAMELEON is a Horizon Europe Project that aims to optimise production and identify potential problems in agriculture, livestock, forestry and rural areas. To achieve this, the CHAMELEON Project use a novel reconfigurable drone, able to modify its configuration and sizing upon demand, which can be deployed in homogeneous or heterogeneous groups to support complex scenarios, as well as a set of existing heterogeneous, modular, interoperable, networked unmanned vehicles systems. The CHAMELEON Consortium consists of 12 partner organisations distributed in 9 European Countries, with a high participation of innovative SMEs (6 in total), 3 universities and 3 end users. CHAMELEON advances will be validated in three pilot use cases in Spain, Greece and Austria. In addition, CHAMELEON will organise two open calls for SMEs to generate AI supported solutions with financial, technical and business mentorship from the project partners.

Agriculture:

CHAMELEON Automatic UAV Based Segmentation Approach for Carbon Sequestration and Biomass Estimation in Vineyards, Olive Trees and Almond Crops.

The aim of this module is to develop a system to quantify the CO2 sequestration by plans using LASER scanner systems and determine the ecosystemic service of perennial crops on greenhouse gas emissions.

CHAMELEON UAV in Irrigation and water stress monitoring and management.

A procedure to design and dimensioning precision irrigation systems will be developed by combining high-resolution remote sensing products and irrigation systems products. Novel irrigation systems that integrate different types of emitters (drippers or sprinklers) in the same subunit will be implemented to apply the adequate water volume to each zone of the plot that requires different amount of water.

Livestock:

CHAMELEON UAV-assisted livestock health monitoring.

This module will focus on supporting farmers with dashboards empowered by AI-based prediction and decision support for animal Health and high-quality animal products. In particular, the module will enable animal welfare tracking through health and welfare recording protocols which will be applied using various sensor technologies and digitalised records.

Forestry:

CHAMELEON plant health assessment toolkit.

Areas of stands damaged by pests or diseases occupy large areas of forest. Defining the boundaries of such damaged areas is problematic and determining the possibilities and directions of the spread of outbreaks is difficult. Looking at the tree crowns from above, the damaged tree crowns stand out in colour from the crowns of healthy (undamaged) trees. This makes it possible to single out individual damaged and dead trees or groups of trees in the monitored stands, and even to distinguish the degrees of damage to the stands.

Pest Management:

Selective spraying application for low-risk fertilization and forest health protection. CHAMELEON framework will support the combination of RPA weed and pest mapping and drone sprayers into an aerial integrated system in order to offer a new alternative and low risk site‐specific pest and weed management.