Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Russell IPM and The University of Buckingham

Russell IPM is a market leader in providing customer focused solutions to the issues faced by pest controllers. They will be working on a KTP project with Dr Ihsan Lami and Professor Sabah Jassim in the Applied Computing Department that has been developing novel image analysis and integrated wireless communication techniques for over 10 years, to develop a smart-trap.

The smart-trap will attract specific types of insects based on their pheromones. Trapped insects will be photographed by a camera where all insects are counted and recognised based on specific signatures. An embedded system with a wireless sensor network will communicate the information over an IoT network to a host server. The server will do further analysis and will inform farmers of an infestation when it happens, as shown below (click on the image for a larger version).The project, worth £200,000 over 30 months and jointly funded by Innovate UK and Russell IPM, is to enable a new generation of farming products aimed to satisfy new EU Sustainable Use Directive where spraying pesticides should only be carried out on crops within an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategy.

Dr Al-Zaidi, managing director of Russell IPM said “Empowering the monitoring traps with an on-board expert-recognition, in a commercially viable embedded ‘monitoring & forecasting’ system, will provide Russell IPM with an exclusive growth capability into new markets and applications ahead of our competition.”

Dr Lami commented that “we are very pleased to be able to help Russell IPM gain the knowledge / experience in image recognition and to help them develop the capacity to build an end-to-end solution starting with an embedded system to differentiate between trapped insects reliably and efficiently, taking into consideration the limited power & connectivity available at the remote farm locations.”

Kim Corthouts, Applied Computing Intern