The Artificial Intelligence methods developed by Soonapse for Ploovium® have had the recognition of the Italian patent and the international PCT.
The patent is entitled “System for optimizing the use of water in irrigation based on the predictive calculation of the water potential of the land“. It includes 11 claims, which define the overall choices made to make the Artificial Intelligence model effective: the type of sensors, the agronomic rules, the design of significant data, predictive algorithms, etc. etc.
The process began in June 2019 with the submission of the application to UIBM (Italian Patent and Trademark Office).
UIBM has commissioned the EPO (European Patent Office) to search for international anteriority, and the response of March 2020 was that all of our 11 claims are “original, inventive and industrially applicable”.
With this particularly favorable opinion we obtained the international PCT, and in May 2021 the formal recognition of the Italian patent.
The AI module works in two successive phases:
- in the first phase, the values of the water potential of the specific soil / crop system are defined for the next 5 days, at 3-hour intervals like the weather forecast. This first step is particularly important because it allows Ploovium to obtain extremely high reliability data (our predictions reach and exceed 99% accuracy), on which to set the irrigation advice with the best optimization and maximum safety for the crop. In this phase, the AI tools used are the Random Forest and the Recurrent Neural Networks;
- in the next step, based on the predictive data of the water potential of the soil / crop system, the irrigation advice (when and how much to irrigate) is defined. In this second step Ploovium® uses genetic algorithms.
Ploovium® creates a specific AI instance dedicated to the specific area / crop to ensure maximum safety, accuracy and efficiency of the water used.
Ploovium® has been designed to be Plug & Play therefore simple and immediate; for its installation and configuration no consultancy, preventive soil analysis, or other special knowledge are required and after the first 15 days of use, it provides irrigation advice.