Soil sampling with drones and augmented reality in precision agriculture

[Display omitted] •Prototyping application of augmented reality as wearable technology in agriculture.•Drone based aerial imaging of bare soil field plot to create a colour map of soil.•Automatic determination of management zones for precision farming from a colour map.•Software for augmented reality smartglasses to assist user to collect soil samples.•Complete tool chain from aerial imaging to create a soil property map. Soil sampling is an important tool to gather information for making proper decisions regarding the fertilization of fields. Depending on the national regulations, the minimum frequency may be once per five years and spatially every ten hectares. For precision farming purposes, this is not sufficient. In precision farming, the challenge is to collect the samples from such regions that are internally consistent while limiting the number of samples required. For this purpose, management zones are used to divide the field into smaller regions. This article presents a novel approach to automatically determine the locations for soil samples based on a soil map created from drone imaging after ploughing, and a wearable augmented reality technology to guide the user to the generated sample points. Finally, the article presents the results of a demonstration carried out in southern Finland.