USE CASE
Precise Positioning and Coverage for Agricultural Robots
Overview
The robotics company - Robotec - that is building warehousing and agricultural robotics required reliable and scalable connectivity to ensure the precise positioning, advanced performance and reliability of their solution in complicated radio environement. Choosing private mobile network allowed them to provide high quality of connectivity, better coverage, integrated security and unlocked additional business cases.
Also, the Wi-Fi spectrum might become really "noisy" with the introduction of additional Wi-Fi routers or handheld devices brought by employees, which will cause a negative impact on connectivity for robots.
Increased latency, unstable connectivity can decrease the performance of robots which will essentially lead to revenue loss due to the longer time to get the requested product off the shelf.
A new generation of agricultural robots require stable throughput over the fields where they operate in order to support precise positioning (GPS RTK), HD cyber vision, machine data, and telemetry.
LoRaWAN - a typical go-to technology for smart-agriculture works perfectly when you have to connect sensors over a large area, but can't provide enough throughput to support HD video streams and all the telemetry. And covering fields with Wi-Fi is impractical and economically not feasible.
Approach & Solution
The private mobile network via the NaturalFQ's Coverage solution provide our customer connectivity with enough bandwidth to support all the mentioned requirements and covered square miles with a help of cost-efficient outdoor base stations.
Additionally, NaturalFQ provided RTK capability which allowed to get location service with a precision down to inches.
Conclusions
Suggested approach allowed to have Robotec's robots the following:
● Dispensing liquids and compounds exactly on a row of plants, avoiding blanket sprinkling.
● Executing a highly customized program created by the agricultural chemist.
● Achieving controller traffic farming and enforcing traffic lanes in fields - this will help to reduce the negative impact on soils by the heavy machinery.