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Award will continue development of novel soil moisture sensors for sustainable agricultural irrigation.
VerTimes -- Transcend Engineering announced today it has received a follow-on Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The company will use the grant funding to develop a new type of soil moisture sensor that will lead to more sustainable agricultural irrigation. By leveraging low-cost Wi-Fi chips as sensors of soil wetness, this new approach will greatly reduce the cost of detailed sensing required to support sophisticated irrigation management.
Excessive irrigation threatens crop health, deprives other users of water, and can carry expensive nutrients to the groundwater where they are wasted and can contaminate drinking water. Optimizing irrigation requires real-time data throughout a farm. By lowering the cost of detailed sensing, Transcend's scientists aim to drive greater adoption of sophisticated water management systems. The company has previously developed an artificial intelligence measuring water uptake in planted crops, as well as how much water bypasses root systems and enters the groundwater table by closely measuring soil wetness versus depth.
"We are appreciative of our partners at NOAA for this grant funding, as they recognize the difficulty of this problem," said Transcend Engineering's Founder and Lead Technologist, Stephen Farrington. "Separating out how much water gets past the roots from how much is absorbed is extremely difficult unless you're growing the plant in a lab environment. Water can move through regions of soil without changing the moisture content. Picture holding a sponge under your slowly running kitchen faucet," says Farrington. "It's moisture content will stabilize pretty quickly, while water keeps flowing through it. Soils behave very similarly, so figuring out the flow from the content is a major achievement for us."
"This federal grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help Vermont deepen its roots in the agriculture technology sector – an important field that has the potential to boost our resilience to climate change. This is great news for Transcend Engineering, a Vermont-based innovator," said Senator Peter Welch, a member of the U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee.
The proliferation of wireless devices has driven the cost of Wi-Fi transceiver chips down while their sophistication has tremendously increased. Modern Wi-Fi chips are capable of collecting massive amounts of information about raw signals between devices, making it available to engineers and programmers through software interfaces. Transcend's scientists are using this data to tease out information about the environment in which the chips are deployed. When that environment is the earth, they have shown they can sense how much water is in the soil. Transcend has partnered with LandScan, a California-based agricultural technology company, to bring the new sensor technology to market.
For more information, visit: http://www.transcendengineering.com
Excessive irrigation threatens crop health, deprives other users of water, and can carry expensive nutrients to the groundwater where they are wasted and can contaminate drinking water. Optimizing irrigation requires real-time data throughout a farm. By lowering the cost of detailed sensing, Transcend's scientists aim to drive greater adoption of sophisticated water management systems. The company has previously developed an artificial intelligence measuring water uptake in planted crops, as well as how much water bypasses root systems and enters the groundwater table by closely measuring soil wetness versus depth.
"We are appreciative of our partners at NOAA for this grant funding, as they recognize the difficulty of this problem," said Transcend Engineering's Founder and Lead Technologist, Stephen Farrington. "Separating out how much water gets past the roots from how much is absorbed is extremely difficult unless you're growing the plant in a lab environment. Water can move through regions of soil without changing the moisture content. Picture holding a sponge under your slowly running kitchen faucet," says Farrington. "It's moisture content will stabilize pretty quickly, while water keeps flowing through it. Soils behave very similarly, so figuring out the flow from the content is a major achievement for us."
"This federal grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help Vermont deepen its roots in the agriculture technology sector – an important field that has the potential to boost our resilience to climate change. This is great news for Transcend Engineering, a Vermont-based innovator," said Senator Peter Welch, a member of the U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee.
The proliferation of wireless devices has driven the cost of Wi-Fi transceiver chips down while their sophistication has tremendously increased. Modern Wi-Fi chips are capable of collecting massive amounts of information about raw signals between devices, making it available to engineers and programmers through software interfaces. Transcend's scientists are using this data to tease out information about the environment in which the chips are deployed. When that environment is the earth, they have shown they can sense how much water is in the soil. Transcend has partnered with LandScan, a California-based agricultural technology company, to bring the new sensor technology to market.
For more information, visit: http://www.transcendengineering.com
Source: Transcend Engineering & Technology
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