The collaboration between Ingenium Research Group and Universidad Europea developed a new research work for smart faming with drones. Fausto Pedro García Márquez and Carlos Quiterio Gómez Muñoz have been awarded with the Runner-up prize for the excellent paper titled «Smart Farming: Intelligent Management Appoach for Crop Inspection and Evaluation Employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles».

This work presents an unmanned aerial vehicle management platform encompassed in the concept of smart farming. Automates inspections of different crops and monitors the status of the plantation is done by IoT, analyzing an area on an online map that provides air and weather restrictions. Intelligent route management algorithms are employed to generate the optimal inspection route and waypoints, maximizing the multispectral images capture. These multispectral images can be subsequently processed according to algorithms based on phytosanitary index formulas and regressions obtained with artificial neural networks. Reports are generated with analysis of the results by this approach, for example: optimal collection time, water stress, maturity index, etc.

The prize was given online due to Co-vid pandemic on 31th of July 2020 at the 14th International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management in Moldova (2020 ICMSEM). It is the annual conference organized and supported by the International Society of Management Science and Engineering Management (ISMSEM), Sichuan University, Monash University.

The conference is to foster international research collaborations in Management Science and Engineering Management as well as to provide a forum for presenting current research work in the forms of technical sessions. Since 2007, the International Society of Management Science and Engineering Management (ISMSEM) has organized the ICMSEM. Springer has accepted papers of each conference  in proceedings and published on Springer. ICMSEM aims to bring together researchers, scientists, engineers, and scholars to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects of management science and engineering management, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted.