Category Archives: Autonomy and Automation

Private Cellular emerges as a new farm option

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We still think WiFi is the easiest and least expensive way to build your Wireless Farm Network. However, we had a meeting recently with a company that’s taking an interesting new approach using private cellular technology.

I wrote in this blog a while ago about WiFi vs. private cellular, and I said that private cellular was a viable option but probably not as practical as meshing WiFi for farm use.

I mentioned cellular in my recent blog post about Wireless Farm Networking, but I focused on public cellular networks, and I still think what I wrote there (not under control of the grower, expensive, inconvenient) is valid.

Private Cellular using CBRS

The folks I talked to last week are setting up private cellular networks on farms using CBRS equipment that can be tied to the farm’s existing Local Area Network (LAN). They set up and maintain the equipment wherever you want it, and a single cell tower can provide good access up to a mile away – potentially much farther than a single WiFi access point.

This overcomes several of my criticisms of private cellular:

  • Locality – if the private cellular network is connected to the same network as the rest of the farm’s equipment, everything on the farm can “talk” to each other with minimal latency (time spent in transit). This is both a matter of convenience (you can print an invoice from out in the fields on your printer in the farm office), but it will become extremely important as we have more autonomous machines on the farm that need to “talk” to a central server and to each other to coordinate. High bandwidth (like what’s offered by cellular or WiFi) and low latency are key to making autonomous machines work – having to go “to the cloud” on the public network means that those machines will be waiting much longer to get those critical messages.
  • Control – one of the key “selling points” of the AyrMesh network is that you control where you expand the network, not the cellular carrier. Using a private cellular network, you can determine where the network goes. This is crucial – whether WiFi or cellular, the network is worthless if it isn’t where you need it!
  • Subscription fees – on a WiFi network, of course, you can add as many devices as you want (within the capacity of the network) by just filling in the SSID and passkey on the devices. On a cellular network, you have to use SIM card (or eSIM), and the cellular carriers want you to charge you a monthly fee for every device you add to their network. However, on a private network, you control the SIM cards (and the company we met with is dedicated to helping you manage them).

I think this makes private cellular using CBRS a viable alternative for your wireless farm network. Is it the best alternative? I think that depends quite a lot on you and the nature of your farm.

Pros and Cons

Because of the nature of cellular equipment, they have to be responsible for all the installation and maintenance. Our approach to meshing WiFi has always been pretty much “DIY” or leaving our customers to find appropriate installation support, because AyrMesh equipment is very simple. However, we do receive requests for referrals to local installers. Additionally, per my earlier post about “get it in the air,” many growers probably should think about building more permanent infrastructure for their farm networks, and that is a task that might better be contracted out.

Private cellular uses “B48 LTE” band at 3.6 GHz., and almost all modern phones and cellular-equipped tablets and laptops can connect to that band. Installed at a good height, a single CBRS radio will cover a lot more ground than a single WiFi access point – you should be able to use it up to a mile away on a phone, whereas An AyrMesh Hub can typically only reach a few hundred yards to a phone. On the other hand, older cellular devices and a lot of “IoT” cellular devices (4G cameras, IoT boards like my favorite “Particle” boards) cannot connect to B48. This is likely to change as CBRS becomes more common, of course.

Please Help!

We’re very interested in what you think about this – is private LTE cellular an interesting option for you? What other options would you like to see? Please comment below or you can take our quick survey.

The Robots are Coming! The Robots are Coming!

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One idea of an autonomous farm…

Every week there seems to be an announcement about autonomous farm equipment – John Deere acquired Blue River in 2017, and then Bear Flag Robotics last year, and now they’re, essentially, announcing Bear Flag’s products as their own. Meanwhile, Case bought Raven Industries last year, after Raven had acquired DOT Technology and SmartAg. Even smaller, specialty-crop companies are getting into this, like GUSS and Fieldin.

The case for autonomous rolling stock is obvious – if you’re not driving the tractor/sprayer/combine/whatever, you can be somewhere else doing something else valuable. And there are times you would really rather have the robot driving…

I have considered tillage to be the activity most ready for automation, so I had applauded Bear Flag’s emphasis on tillage and Deere’s decision to acquire them and offer an autonomous 8R for tillage. I’ll be interested to see how this goes… it’s coming at a time when no-till or strip-till is increasingly popular, but there’s still a lot of the world still digging up fields.

Planting and harvest are difficult, complex, and time-sensitive tasks, so I expect they will be the last to be automated, but that still leaves spraying and cultivating. GUSS out here in California is already out spraying orchards, and, again, I think Deere was smart to acquire Blue River for their vision-based weeding system. It’s not ready to be a blockbuster product this year, but I can certainly see a future where weeding (and possibly other pest control) is done by a self-driving machine. The autonomous farm won’t be a complete “rip-and-replace” operation – I expect we’ll see it come one piece at a time, slowly replacing human labor, just as it has for the last 200 years.

In truth, once you are liberated from having to drive the machine, of course, you can actually employ more machines. You can have multiple large machines, like the Deere 8R tractor or the Raven (now Case) Omnipower platform, working in different fields, or you could conceivably start replacing some of them with swarms of small, nimble machines like the prototype Fendt Xaver seeder or the Australian Swarmfarm sprayer.

However, having multiple machines in the field requires that they be able to communicate with each other and, possibly, with a central server. That communications must be both low-latency (to avoid delays and collisions) and high-bandwidth (to ensure that they can “speak freely” – at times they’ll need to communicate a lot of information). There are a lot of pundits out there telling us that “5G will solve everything” – and the technical specs tell us that could be absolutely true. That leaves only one important question: do you have 5G on your farm today?

If you’re in the 95% or so who answer “no” to that question, you might want to consider another solution – a solution that might even be better. Meshing WiFi was originally designed to enable “Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks” or “MANETs” – exactly what these devices are using in the field. Instead of waiting for a carrier (or several – many farmers I know require two or more phones, because one carrier covers one part of the farm and a different carrier covers another) to come and plant a 5G network on your property, you can start establishing a WiFi network across your property using AyrMesh Hubs and AyrMesh Cab Hubs for your vehicles.

The advantages of using WiFi include:

  • You control the network: what gets covered and who gets to use it
  • It uses your existing Internet connection – no extra charges
  • It connects to your existing LAN – you can put servers on your network so data need not leave your farm
  • It’s standard, so it works with everything, from your laptop to cameras to low-cost soil sensors and controllers… including robots
  • It will get better with time – new versions of WiFi will bring advantages.

This is an exciting time for farming – things are going to change pretty quickly, and there will be real advantages for those who adopt new technologies. The AyrMesh network provides a “backbone” that allows you to adopt those technologies easily, and we’re eager to work with the companies that are producing these new technologies to maximize the value they bring to farmers.