PHOTO: GALAMA MEDIA
COMMUNICATION ▶▶▶
Fast 5G reduces waiting time from 2 days to 2 hours
BY ERIC WIENTJES A
t this moment the procedure men- tioned takes at least a whole day, or more likely 2 days. The process of ordering a drone flight and the
scanning of fields will remain the same in the future. Then comes the uploading of images made by the drone. With the current wireless connection speeds the camera is producing images 3 times faster than the drone can send them during flight. The alternative, sending the images while the pilot is driving from a fin- ished job to the next one, is not practical. In current practice the data ‘harvested’ during the day is being processed in the office at night. Which means: the computer combines countless pictures taken of one field and turns them into one image. Next this file (directly or through the client) is sent to Akkerweb, where software applications analyse the results and produce spraying advice in the form of a map. This in turn is being sent via the internet to the contractor, who uploads the map onto the sprayer using a USB stick.
Increase the pace The 5G Fieldlab aims to increase the pace of these applications. After all, spraying – like lots of other agricultural jobs – heavily depends on weather conditions. In such cases as a farmer you want as little time as possible between the decision to hire a drone and the actual spraying.
5G Fieldlab
The 5G Fieldlab is a joint venture of Wageningen University & Research (making research data practicable for precision farming), KPN (wireless communication), Dronehub GAE (a collective of Dutch drone service companies ), Agrifac (spraying technology), the province of Drenthe, and Innovatie Veenkoloniën (who have many potato growers in their working area). Goal is to ‘smooth out’ brand new technological developments and make them user-friendly, so the ‘av- erage’ farmer can use them in his daily work. In 2018’s pilot the focus is on leaf killing and ac- celerating data communication. Leaf killing is chosen because it is a relative simple form of precision farming to start with.
35 ▶ FUTURE FARMING | 1 November 2018
A mere two hours between arrival of the drone pilot who scans the potato leaf, and loading of the map for the self-propelled sprayer which sprays the leaf with agent; that’s what the so-called 5G Fieldlab aims to achieve. And they are making progress, as was shown on 3 October during a demonstration on the Dutch test farm ’t Kompas in Valthermond.
The time-consuming combining of a huge amount of drone images in order to create a field view can only be done quicker using a fast- er processing computer. But real improvement can be made using faster wireless data traffic. 5G Fieldlab’s partner KPN (a Dutch telecom company) is developing new mobile technolo- gy for that purpose, which will increase upload- ing speeds from the drone threefold.
Experimental KPN network During the demonstration the images were not sent at a speed of 30Mbps (4G), but at a speed of 120 Mbps through an experimental KPN net- work (which is supposed to develop into 5G). Fieldlab 5G work is also working on automati- cally sending the biomass map to Akkerweb, and afterwards wirelessly transferring the same map to the SIM Card in the GPS system of the Agrifac sprayer. The thought behind this is to reduce human actions to a minimum in order to achieve a smooth workflow. After all, the smoother the process goes, the quicker it will be accepted and used by farmers.
Drone pilot ready for take-off... The Agrifac sprayer on the left has to wait for a mere 2hours before the map is ready.
This near-future scenario worked well during the demo. The Agrifac sprayer was able to spray the potato leaf with the right amount of agent needed for each spot, based on the data provided by the drone flight executed only hours before.
Less agent needed It will be up to arable farmers whether they decide to use this technology. The costs are, at € 17 to € 18 per hectare, higher than when for instance satellite images are being used (€ 2 per hectare). However, because the map is so much more accurate, a lot less agent is need- ed, which saves costs. The impact on the envi- ronment is also a lot less, and that benefits the image of agriculture, the farmer’s conscience and – perhaps – sales opportunities.
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