Background

With a steadily growing world population, increasing agricultural production, while also dealing with labor shortages and demand for eco-friendly nutritious products is a challenge farmer and the agriculture industry is currently facing. Farm automation, or “smart farming,” uses a variety of fine-tuned calibrations and tech innovations in traditional farming that makes farms more efficient, optimizes crop or livestock production process and improves product quality.

Advanced autonomous farming technology is changing the way we farm and can be an essential part of the famer’s day-to-day life of crop oversight, soil nutrients and more. Technology such as the in-vehicle gateway and similar equipment allows for remote control use and monitoring of farm equipment, resulting in healthier crops and getting more of a return on harvests.

Autonomous Agriculture Equipment Types

The primary goal of farm automation technology is to cover labor-intensive repetitive, mundane tasks for maximum efficiency.

● IoT Sensors: Timely and refined decision-making makes a successful farm. IoT sensors installed on the farm will constantly monitor soil and crop health. Sensors can also be used to monitor changes in weather, and soil moisture levels to adjust water and nutrient schedules and amounts accordingly. These sensors will report changes in real-time, allowing farmers to monitor their crops remotely.

● Monitoring/Analytics: A Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) can be essential to autonomous agriculture by monitoring the location and driving patterns of farming equipment and keeping an eye on poorer-performing crops.

● Autonomous Tractors: Autonomous tractors can be controlled remotely, allowing farmers to move freely while maintaining and monitoring seeding, soil, and crops. An autonomous tractor will spread fertilizer and seeds to the areas that need them most based on sensor data and farmer input.

Advantages and Benefits of Autonomous Agriculture

Smart farm automation technology has great potential to be tremendously impactful and efficient for farmers.

● Time and Energy: Autonomous farming equipment will work 24/7, granting farmers more time to focus on product quality, such as watering, seeding, soil testing etc. Autonomous machinery increases safety by lowering risks of personal injury from heat exhaustion, or overworking.

● Greater Savings: Autonomous agriculture equipment will constantly monitor all aspects of crops and resources. Sensors monitoring soil moisture levels and more will save water resources, and lowers overall operation costs over time. Precision farming will assist with harvesting more efficiently and product yields will be healthier, further increasing harvest profits.

● Accurate and Detailed Data: It’s not easy to fully monitor average fields. Agricultural sensors will relay information about soil, crop health, temperature, light positions, and air quality directly to the farmer and lower human error risks in crop analysis. The data gathered can also help farmers plan out viable crops and farming fields year by year, further maximizing resources.

Conclusion

We maybe only at the early stages of farm automation technology, but it does offer a path toward sustainable and more efficient agriculture and proven that farmers are better off with automated solutions than without.

Lanner provides an integrated ITS computing platform that empowers Edge AI and 5G connectivity. These rugged computers consolidate ITS workloads that not only enable AI computing for field video analytics and autonomous driving, but also deliver secure 5G connectivity and mobile cellular bonding for data transport from edge to cloud.

Featured Products


LVC-2001

Fanless Vehicle Gateway Controller with Intel Atom E3825 or E3845 Processor

CPU Intel® Atom SoC E3825 or E3845 CPU
Chipset N/A (SoC)

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V3S

Fanless In-vehicle Surveillance Computer with Intel® Atom™ x7-E3950 Processor

CPU Intel® Atom™ x7-E3950
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