• precision agriculture
• photonics systems
• measurements of absorption
• LIDAR
• coherent architecture
• RADAR

Optical LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems, developed in the context of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies), represent a methodology that allows the exploration of different physical elements i.e. the forest heritage and of the atmosphere.
They are often used in environment monitoring systems, as for example precision agriculture.
In recent years, experimental and theoretical investigation has shown that LIDAR is a powerful tool to measure absorption level, range and Doppler effect.
This work reports the activity carried out for the architectural design, the implementation and the simulation of a LIDAR sensing system specifically engineered for precision agriculture (PA), to face the urgent requirements of non-invasive timely and enhanced retrieving of high-quality and heterogeneous information.
The aim of the present thesis is to submit a LIDAR architecture, different from the well-known commercial LIDAR.
Commercial systems are large, expensive, based on a non-coherent detection and with high-quality photodiodes in the architecture. The new model of LIDAR aims to be smaller and low-cost, to use cheaper photodiodes and to provide a coherent architecture to increase its performance.
This work aims at developing the design and the implementation of a new lidar, with innovative features as frequency agility, coherence, and multi-frequency operation, for an enhanced, adaptable and multi-feature observation of crop and soil enabling insights on new parameters (soil structure, canopy density, products load, disease presence) for key advances of PA approach. Particular focus will be given to the problems of simulation and implementation.
The designed and implemented system will be tested during an experimental campaign carried out in the Institute of Communication, Information and Perception Technologies (TeCIP) of the Advanced Studies Sant’Anna School (SSSA). These measurements will be important to test the architecture for measurements of absorption to understand the problems shown by our system during its working and how to solve them.