Case File2020
PalmSpector — Robotic Monitoring for Date Palm Health
NYU Abu Dhabi · with Imperial College London IDE
Integrated robotic monitoring system for early Red Palm Weevil detection at the scale of UAE date plantations — fusing acoustic, thermal, and RGB sensing so hidden larval infestations can be flagged before trunk collapse, then handing farmers targeted trees for inspection rather than blanket pesticide treatment.
System Record
- Application
- APPAgriculture Monitoring
- Environment
- Outcomes
- OUTCOMEDeployed Prototype
- Period
- 2020
My Contribution
Built the multimodal field data collector and automated the inspection path on Clearpath Husky — sensor fusion, SLAM under canopy, and Gazebo simulation for plantation-scale monitoring.
Development & Validation
- Built a sensor-fusion field data collector around a single-board computer: thermal and RGB cameras, contact microphone, GPS-RTK, storage, and a Healthy/Infested UI so every tree sample follows the same acquisition protocol for supervised deep learning.
- Field-validated acoustic trunk probing and multimodal capture across date plantations, addressing the core challenge that RPW larvae feed internally and leave almost no external symptoms until it is too late to save the tree.
- Automated the inspection path on a Clearpath Husky UGV platform — SLAM with RGB-D sensing under palm canopy, plus Gazebo/RViz simulation of row navigation — so the same sensing stack can scale from handheld surveys to thousands of trees.
Credits & Collaborators
Imperial College London · Innovation Design Engineering (IDE)
Research partner
NYU Abu Dhabi
Host institution
Evidence
photograph
PalmSpector field collector and plantation corridor