Smart Farming: How 5G Powers Digitization of Agriculture

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas the agricultural technology heavyweight John Deere unveiled its first large-scale production-ready autonomous tractor. The U.S. manufacturer has equipped its 8R tractor with a remote-controllable steering system and six stereo cameras. The cameras keep an eye on the ground around the tractor and identify larger obstacles in the field. The tractor stays on track to within two or three centimeters thanks to GPS and mobile radiolocation.

If he wants to, the farmer can follow the action live by using a smartphone app to watch the cameras’ video stream. He can also use the app to stop and start the tractor. He can even adjust the speed and depth of plowing remotely. The 8R solves several problems at the same time. It plows more precisely than a human, frees up the farmer for other tasks and is also a possible solution to the shortage of skilled farm workers.

Driverless farm machinery is only one innovation made possible by the digitization of agriculture, also known as smart farming (see definition). With sensor technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, just about everything in agriculture can be recorded. A drone with sensors makes recording mobile to the max. Autonomously or remote-controlled, drones can take the place of manual farm labor and in addition bring new findings for the future.

Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST), for example, is using drones in a pilot project to photograph dock plants in a field, dock being an undesirable plant that displaces crop plants. A wireless module in the drone relays the digital image data to the Cloud via the 5G cellular network for real-time analysis. Artificial intelligence (AI) then kicks in. Software with self-learning algorithms identifies the harmful plant and sends this information back to the field, where an agricultural robot is navigated by GPS to the unloved dock plant and targets it with a herbicide. According to the OST this method reduces the use of herbicide by up to 90 percent. The experts are also considering the use of hot water instead of herbicide in the future.

In a poll of agricultural enterprises in Germany PwC management consultants have identified the pinpointed use of fertilizer as an application with the greatest savings potential. Site-specific fertilization in particular, which takes into account growth and soil differences within a field, can be made more efficient by means of digital technologies. Drones equipped with multispectral cameras or robot vehicles that register light in the near infrared range can for example establish the growth and nitrogen requirement of crop plants or measure soil humidity and temperature. With these measurements at their disposal farmers can pinpoint their fertilization and irrigation and thereby save valuable resources.

5G cellular technology, which is now available almost everywhere in rural areas (see Infobox), ensures swift and reliable transmission even of large amounts of image and video data. In the future 5G will also help farmers when they have problems with their machines. The INVIA project of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems (ICS) is working on a mobile, cloud-assisted assistance system for diagnosing and servicing complex agricultural machinery. If a tractor or harvester breaks down the driver contacts the manufacturer’s customer service, which helps to identify the fault by means of audio, image and video. If a callout is required, the technician will then arrive with the right tools and spare part. Wearing augmented reality (AR) glasses the technician can even be guided through the repair on-site by an expert at his service desk. Thanks to a swift and stable 5G connection all these steps go ahead smoothly and successfully.

Plowing, sowing, harvesting and getting rid of weeds in the field require precision, and here too 5G comes into its own, especially for autonomous harvesters, seed drones, tractors and field robots that are designed to take the physical labor aspect of hard work out of farming. They need the most exact Web description of their way around the field. The German startup AI.Land and Aachen University of Applied Sciences have developed an autonomous robot that is designed to automate monotonous and physically demanding work in the field. The robot stays on track thanks to precise positioning.

The localization precision of GPS is optimally to between three and five meters, which is much too inaccurate for plowing topsoil in a field. Precise Positioning, a solution developed by Deutsche Telekom and the U.S. navigation specialist Swift, is precise to within ten centimeters. How does it do it? Special antennas (Germany already has a nationwide network in place) collect GPS signals from 40 to 50 GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) satellites. From this data and the exact stationary data from the antennas a Swift cloud algorithm calculates corrected high-precision position data and relays it in real time via the G5 cellular network to vehicles, drones and autonomous machines. This innovative technology helps AI-Land’s farm robot to stay precisely on track – and to relieve farm workers of what is otherwise not the most pleasant work.