Introduction
Precision Agriculture is one of this century’s most used cases of autonomy. Recent reports show that by 2025, Precision Agriculture is expected to grow into a 43.4-billion-dollar industry worldwide (“What Is Precision Agriculture and How Is Technology Enabling It?”). For an industry that didn’t begin gaining traction until the 1990’s, it’s pretty impressive market.
As it stands, the farming industry has some of the most constrained budgets of any industry. When investing in new farming methods, the cost of labor is the most crucial factor driving change. If the technology involved in the potential methods of precision agriculture is considered more expensive than human efforts to do the same job, farmers have no reason to invest in the change. This creates a demand for inexpensive technology to maximize profitability.
Inertial Labs is teaming up with companies across the globe to engineer solutions that are helping farmers become more profitable. Whether you are a large-scale farming operation or a small, local supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables to a farmer’s market, automating your processes should be a hassle-free option that increases profit margin.
What are the Benefits?
Methods of Precision Agriculture expand across all levels of the agriculture industry. If you’re environmentally conscious, this is a market for you. Perhaps you prefer to produce organic crops, minimizing the amount of exposure they get to fertilizers? Don’t like wasting water? Maybe it’s as simple as you would like a little more free time in your day. Whatever the case, automating work and adopting methods in line with the Precision Agriculture industry can lead to some, if not all, of the following benefits:
- Ability to health-monitor and respond based on current conditions of soil and crops
- Maximize profitability
- Reduction of material wastes by precision planting
- Ability to project crop yields
- Minimizing carbon footprint by micro-spraying pesticides
Components of Precision Agriculture
The components of Precision Agriculture can be broken down into two major categories: Software and Hardware. Ideally, the two are used parallel to have a practical solution, constantly feeding information back and forth to drive the best results.
Hardware
Autonomous Farming Vehicles outfitted with devices like cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, LiDAR sensors, light and heavy response machinery to mitigate poor crop conditions, datalogger, etc. Regardless of the task, any vehicle that operates autonomously has to be able to communicate with an outside source and detect motion in its reference frame. Many farming vehicles like seeders, tillers, sprayers, harvesters, and surveying drones can be automated using these devices.
Currently, this is one of the largest expanding industries across the globe. Autonomous vehicles have developed farming techniques far beyond those of the 20th century and now embrace methods that help maximize production by identifying soil characteristics, predicting and measuring field drainage both above and below ground, and generating electromagnetic soil maps.
Base Stations are key to autonomous operations on the farm. Real-time kinematic (RTK) corrections can be sent from a localized position to ensure autonomous vehicles operate precisely and accurately. Some Base Stations, like the one offered by Inertial Labs, can send corrections at different frequencies up to 50 kilometers away. The visual below shows how many Precision Agriculture vehicles use a Base Station to ensure they are getting precision position accuracy.
Integration Solutions are the most critical feature of the agriculture industry. Most products are manufactured and sold at an individual component level or a complete system level. However, many agricultural business operators already have machinery that has operated reliably for years. Investing in a new system isn’t practical for an industry that operates on tight financial constraints. Companies like Inertial Labs offer solutions that can be integrated into desired existing platforms with ease to make sure that you are paying for performance without the added cost of unnecessary machinery.
The Inertial Labs INS is the one-stop solution for autonomous navigation and communication. The INS supports inputs from cameras, odometers, echosounders, Doppler Velocity Logs (DVLs), radars, encoders, and other external sensors that can be configured to generate solutions utilizing computer vision and machine learning algorithms. The INS also has an internal Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that can be ordered depending on consumer needs based on forces, rates of motion, and accuracy needed for the platform.
Software
Mapping Software is a basic necessity when it comes to software needs for Precision Agriculture. The mapping software will allow you to view your crop’s conditions from a S-eye view. Depending on the software that is used, different functionalities of viewable layers can help you observe characteristics such as soil saturation levels, nitrogen and phosphate levels, estimated profit margins, current conditions of soil or crops, and even locations that have been treated whether from micro-spraying chemicals or mitigating crop conditions (harvesting, weeding, pruning, etc.). All these layers can be viewed on 2D or 3D models to help you understand exactly how your farm operates and where losses can be mitigated.
Automation software is one of the tools most lacking today in precision agriculture. Although many autopilot software today can be used to generate autonomous flight paths using a waypoint feature, it is up to the user to create or purchase expensive personalized software to program the functionality of the autonomous vehicle once it arrives at a waypoint. An effective automation software should consider aiding data from the vehicle and let the user configure actions to be taken when triggered events occur in the field. For example, If a vehicle utilizing Computer Vision identifies a grape of a specific color (identified on RBG or CMYK spectrum), it could mean it needs to be watered, treated with pesticides, fed fertilizer, harvested, or removed from the vine. This identification process of the crop can only be done by advanced Machine Learning processes using a well-developed automation software that helps a farmer monitor all crop conditions without having to identify them manually.
Partnering With You
Inertial Labs offers a complete bundle explicitly tailored for users interested in pursuing the benefits of the Precision Agriculture industry. Industry partners like PLIANT are working with Inertial Labs to create practical solutions for the world of precision agriculture.
Since its founding in 2008, PLIANT has become an innovative and multidisciplinary company specializing in manufacturing solutions involving robotics, vision, and controls on frontiers involving both hardware and software. Pliant began its partnership with Inertial Labs in early 2017 as a platform integrator to supply complete solutions in the precision agriculture market. In recent years, Pliant has become increasingly involved in autonomy. With companies like Inertial Labs by their side, PLIANT has brought autonomous navigation solutions that exceed market expectations in price-value and performance due to their ability to navigate in GNSS-denied environments, mitigating time and financial losses which would previously have been at the expense of the farming industry.
Inertial Navigation Bundle for Precision Agriculture
Inertial Labs offers a complete bundle that is tailored specifically for users who are interested in pursuing the benefits associated with the Precision Agriculture industry. Supplied by Inertial Labs, the INS-B accepts RTCM messages from the continuously operating reference station, the RTK Base Station. Depending on the application type, the INS-B can either be an environmentally sealed IP67-rated enclosure or an OEM model for easy mounting on platforms where weight is a top priority.
The RTK Base Station supports Lefebure NTRIP Caster, a helpful tool that configures RTK correction data to be easily accessible over your Internet through a local IP address.
In addition, post-processing of data is now easier than ever. With Inertial Explorer, a powerful NovAtel software, processing data can now be done in minutes. Create a project, input parameters, and combine data files from the field unit (INS-B) and the RTK Base Station to run the project and correct errors. Inertial Labs has a knowledgeable support staff on standby and well-documented manuals to help walk you through processing your data so you can be confident that results can be processed quickly regardless of your experience level.
