SmartTrap

Team Name

Fruit Fly Warriors

Team Members

Project Description

Our solution, the SmartTrap, is a revolutionary and innovative product which promptly communicates where fruit fly are being detected and allows the South Australian government to notify the right growers as quickly and accurately as possible.

Problems we identified with the current process

• The primary problem is the time between detection of fruit fly in a trap (manual process)
• The time between detection and communication (approximately 1 week)
• Slow manual processes, which haven’t been automated
• Maintaining a number of spreadsheets

How the smart trap solves the problems

The smart trap consists of a camera and on-board electronics that takes an image every hour, and sends it over the internet to a central server, which uses machine learning to detect whether a non-sterile fruit fly has been detected. An SMS alert is then sent to the property owner and to the PIRSA representative - eliminating the lag caused by the site visit and current lag processing.

Benefits of the smart trap:

• Reduces time from detection
• Increased chances of containment of an outbreak
• Reduces production impacts
• Components are affordable and readily available

Automated Smart Trap benefits to society

• Reduces resources required to monitor the traps
• Reduces carbon impact by way of less vehicles on the road monitoring traps/locations
• Increases community engagement

Key Features:

• Automated
• Network connected
• Real-time monitoring
• Automated SMS alert system for affected grower(s) and the Department

Alignment with PIRSA

The video and research indicates that the solution has been formulated in alignment with the Department of Primary Industries and Resources strategic plan 2021 - 2025 overview.

We suggest our solution aligns with the following criteria:

“Support primary industries and regional communities to manage risk, respond and recover quickly from adverse events that impact economic growth and community wellbeing”

Our solution would successfully support the following PIRSA priorities:
- Manages risk to sustainable and productive primary industry sectors
- Improves response time from approximately 1 week to hours, significantly reducing risk of the outbreak further spreading
- Engages the community
- Keeps the community, primarily growers, informed and enables action to combat the issue.

The solution systems and processes are:
- More efficient
- Support producer compliance
- Uses recently developed technology to promote efficient and responsive levels of customer service

Data Story

From our communication with PIRSA officers in the Fruit Fly eradication program, the data and information story here is of a legacy manual data gathering and processing system trying to provide insight for action in managing a natural system that evolves over time frames similar to the data collection and processing. This results in a “whack a mole” reactive management framework poorly suited for minimising and eradicating fruit fly infection.

The type of networked real-time monitoring system proposed, incorporated with predictive fruit fly population modelling informed by weather observation and forecast datasets such as the Bureau of Meteorology Australian Gridded Climate Data (AGCD) and Australian Gridded Forecast Database (AGFD), allows a more efficient and proactive response, with greater chance of containing and eradicating outbreaks.