Electronic trapping and monitoring of insect pests troubling agricultural fields

Abstract

The impulsively fluctuating climatic conditions and the supplementary effects demand the protection of forestry and cultivation. Pests, bugs and insects are the vital issues that distress the development of crop. Eventually, monitoring and trapping of bugs becomes a more challenging task. The traditional human operators execute surveys of the traps dispersed over the field at regular intervals. This encompasses more work, requires considerable time and is not consistent. It is not effective on economic grounds too. These limitations in the existing systems call for automation with affordable cost. Effective pest trapping will be highly favourable to the farmers while capturing and sending the images of pests will be helpful for further analysis in agricultural fields. Moreover, this will be definitely helpful in reducing the usage of pesticides since automatic trapping is efficient and effective. An electronic trap for pest insects by an autonomous monitoring system using black lights (Ultra Violet) and LED lights is suggested in this paper. A statistical analysis is made on the probable time of high pest population and a trap with three layers of different thickness is designed to capture various sizes of prominent pests. A low-cost image sensor is used to capture the images of trapped pests and the images are sent to a remote control station. The information thus acquired enhances the estimation of pest concentrations in farms. The entire analysis is carried out in paddy and brinjal fields and is supported by MSSRF (M S Swaminathan Research Foundation), Chennai.