OPTIMAL SOLUTIONS INC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase II: 8.4

Description

Building on the foundational work of our Phase I research our Phase II project aims to advanceour rapid/real-time in situ soil properties sensor. Our product addresses the soil analysis needsof farmers who want to be proactive in optimal soil management. Our immediatecustomers are the precision agriculture (PA) equipment makers and soil testinglaboratories.Farmers use soil analyses to assess the levels of plant-available nutrients to planfertilization tillage and planting tasks. Soil analysis and the remedial actions directly affect cropquality and yield which in turn significantly affect downstream manufacturing operations infood & beverage companies (like harvesting food processing and packaging). The conventionalapproach to soil analysis involves sending samples to far-off laboratories with results notdelivered until days later. Due to the effort and delay in getting the results and high cost persample growers may choose to analyze soils less frequently and only in some fields and attimes may decide not to analyze soil at all. As a result soil treatments may not fit the soil/croprequirements resulting in lower yields.Variable-rate technology (VRT) - which allows fertilizer chemicals water etc. to be applied atdifferent rates across a farm automatically - is at the heart of PA. PA promises the nextgeneration of proactive soil health management capability to farmers and the food & beverageindustry. Real-time soil property measurement is essential to VRT and today's soil sensors arewoefully inadequate. Our innovation addresses this unmet need in a large global market.In Phase I we demonstrated that using portable sensors and custom data processing algorithmswe achieved a 1000-times faster analysis cycle time 10-times cheaper cost (vs. lab sensors) and80X increase in the density (number of soil tests/acre) covering a wide range of soil propertiesthus proving the feasibility of our innovation. Our Phase II objectives are to 1) Design andconstruct a custom in situ soil sensor for rapid/real-time soil analysis 2) Enhance our models andsoftware and 3) Develop a prototype sensor and demonstrate it in the field. Spectral datagenerated by our sensor and the analytical data generated by the Rutgers soil testing laboratorywill be used to learn the intricate relationship between the spectral data and the soil properties.Cutting-edge machine learning (ML) algorithms will be used to capture this relationship. Ourinnovation lies in combining off-the-shelf detectors with customized optical accessories andadvanced data processing algorithms to deliver a low-cost rugged and portable sensor.This project directly aligns with USDA's soil and water conservation goals. As the world facesincreased demand for food resources like land water and fertilizers must be managedproactively and optimally. Our product enables growers to be more proactive in soil treatmentand consume optimal water and fertilizer amounts while safeguarding soil and water quality.Our research will result in a portable soil sensor that can be marketed to commercial soil testinglabs PA equipment makers food & beverage companies farmers and home-improvement storeswhich rent out tetsing kits to domestic gardeners.Our sensors will enable the commercial soiltesting labs to be more economical and responsive to farmers' needs. Food & beveragecompanies can benefit from our sensor to increase yield and reduce cost on their farms and intheir supply chains.