IAALD AFITA WCCA2008 WORLD CONFERENCE ON AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION AND IT Verification of a Prototype System to Recognize Agricultural Operations Automatically based on RFID

Efficiently recording data of agricultural operations has been required for process control, quality control, and labor management in agriculture. The purpose in this paper is to clarify the possibility and the problem on a method to recognize and record agricultural operations automatically based on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as an automatic identification technology. A prototype system to recognize agricultural operations using small RFID tags and wearable RFID reading devices was developed, and basic operational tests on the system were carried out in order to verify the effectiveness of this method. The wearable device put on by the worker reads the identification data (ID) of the RFID tags which are stuck to the various objects such as machinery, facilities, materials, plants, and fields, while at the agricultural operation. This device continuously sends the data of the object ID and the reading time to the database server via wireless LAN. This server recognizes each task in the agricultural operation by matching the “task pattern” as combinations of the specific objects to these time-series data which are recorded by reading the RFID tags. The prototype system applied two types of RFID tags: microwave type (2.45GHz) and electromagnetic type (13.56MHz). As a result of the operational tests on this system, it was possible to recognize the tasks from the time-series data which were recorded while at the simple operations. However, it was clarified that there were some problems to be solved for further development of a practical system, on RFID reading, data sending, and task detecting.