Department of Agricultural Engineering
Soil & Water Resources Institute
Hellenic Agricultural Organisation «DEMETER»
The Department of Agricultural Engineering of the Hellenic Agricultural Organization "Demeter" was initially founded in 1937, as an "Agricultural Machinery Testing" Station. Upon the creation of the National Agricultural Research Foundation of Greece (NAGREF), it formed one of its research institutes (Institute of Agricultural Machinery and Constructions). It was finally transformed into a Department upon the founding of the Hellenic Agricultural Organization "Demeter". It is one of the four departments of the Institute of Soil and Water Resources.
The Department focuses on both applied research and specialized services in the domain of Agricultural Engineering. Its general research areas and services include the following:
Smart Agriculture refers to the application of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the agricultural sector, combined with the development of specialized, intelligent computational methodologies and tools. Machine learning algorithms and other Artificial Intelligence techniques are developed and applied to wireless sensors and actuators systems, autonomous agricultural vehicles, robotics and other precision equipment, as well as to plant disease identification systems and agricultural data analytics tools,
Research areas of the Department in the field of Smart Agriculture include the following:
Machine Learning
Development of Convolutional Neural Networks and other Deep Learning models for image-based detection of plants diseases.
Wireless Sensor Networks
Design and energy optimization of wireless sensor networks for precision agriculture and smart farming, and their integration into IoT applications.
Autonomous Vehicles
Heuristics and smart algorithms for optimal path planning of autonomous agricultural vehi-cles in various open field applications.
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) deals with the development of optimal conditions for plant cultivation, by combining horticultural and engineering techniques that optimize crop production, quality, and production efficiency. Cultivation in CEA usually takes place within enclosed growing structures, such as greenhouses or growth chambers, while hydroponics constitute the mainly used cultivation technique. Controlled parameters include temperature, relative humidity, light (intensity, interval, etc.), CO2 concentration, nutrients pH and electrical conductivity, etc.
Research related to Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) includes the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for the monitoring and assessment of greenhouse climatic conditions, the creation of sophisticated supplemental lighting systems based on LEDs, and the development of advanced fault detection methodologies for hydroponics and environmental control systems, based on computational intelligence models, smart sensors and advanced data analytics.
