Automation in Agricultural Equipment and Technology
Abstract
Introduction
Automation is something comes with immediate feedback and actions, in modern automation techniques its various devices linked together via communication medium like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite to get the data make predictions and deliver the expected actions need to be taken. The reasons for automation solutions are to maximize efficiency, achieve high precision, and resource delivery when it needed in the expected amount.
When it comes to the agriculture automation it is about using proper agricultural machineries and proper use of available resource in a sustainable approach in each phase of agriculture.
The reason towards the agricultural automation is that the growth of population the supply becomes way higher than before, to meet its demand human capacity is now at very low and labor shortage is getting high with the younger generations with the lack of interested towards the agriculture, on the other side small scale farmers cannot afford to have employees, due to those reasons automation become an ultimate solutions by providing less human intervene and without having to worry about geographical scale of the farm fields, human labor and still able to provide quality product to the consumers.
How Automation works in Agriculture?
Agricultural activities consist of many processes, each of these processes can be automated using new technology. As the first step of farming choosing and processing the most suitable and nutrient soil and efficiently use that soil for plants to grow and produce expected crops. When choosing the soil it consist of various factors like carbon content, ensuring the availability of necessary nutrients and water levels with the capability of water infiltration some of these factors are cannot be measured by a human itself and those factors different from one another on different plant variants, with the technologies like IR (Infrared) and IoT integrated together to create an automated system that analyze the condition of the soil and give information in a user friendly manner that could use to make decisions and predictions, this given the more detailed information to the point that human cannot decide without just looking at it. Remote sensors manufactured by Cropx Inc. has the capability of these and even alerting the farmers about the inadequate level of factors like moisture.
When it comes to the planting process without wasting the time planting should be done in proper order, time and maintain distance consistency to effective use the available space and put the seeds on the most optimal location, automated robots are used with the combination of technologies like Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), IoT, and robots. Agribot is a platform where these automation robots can be built and can be used for the analytics, which provides the great precision and almost all eliminate the wastage of the plants and productivity.
After the initial phase plant should be under continuous monitoring treatment which are distinct from one type of plant to another, the type of treatments and supplies also according to the environmental factors including weather seasons. The issue occurs when using the human labor is that people should always be there on the fields itself, when it comes to the size vast fields consist of hundreds or thousands of hectares human eye would not be the ideal solution to identify issues or monitor the plants conditions by every one of those. Robots embedded with machine learning, AI mechanisms can identify the plants if there are any abnormalities or disease going on with the plant at the early stage of them, which helps spreading further.
To maintain its live hood irrigation system is important as frequent monitoring, and again the Farming fields with the vast amount of land size this could be take too long to watering and supply nutrients externally, in these scenarios with the help of IoT enabled sensors these processes can be fully automated without human intervene. These systems will decide the appropriate level of water, nutrients, and any other supplies through connected lines. System like this should always not be robot but the process is completely automated, but also robotic technologies and drone technologies are now getting widely popular for irrigation process. Toro Company developed irrigation system is a similar example for this. The advantage of these approach is that they are connected through a network that provide continuous feedbacks and current state of the system through mobile apps or software that can view the current state of the field and the data will be processed and presented with visualized approach where end users can extract knowledge and make decisions easily.
Till the proper condition for the harvest pest control and weeding is a very crucial factor, for the pest control automated drones are widely becoming popular specially in countries like German pre-loaded map data into a software integrated into the drone and with the necessary chemicals larger areas can be covered with less human intervene within limited amount of time, a drone called Agras MG-1 which is specially designed for this type of requirements.
As the last steps of these process harvesting, packaging, and delivering the products all the process are now automated. Harvesting is a task should be carried out very gently, with the sensors and AI technology integrated together companies like Abundant Robotics have now developed commercial solutions for harvesting. Even though the supply chain could not completely replace by the automated solutions choosing defected products and sorting and at some level of packaging is now carried out by the automated machines and this sector is keep developing and soon all the activities will be replaced with automated machines soon.
Conclusion
Agriculture is a sector is where the new technologies must be integrated and grow to meet the increasing demand by protecting the quality of its products. With the reasons like labor shortages, lack of interested towards agriculture by young generations, increased population agriculture faces many problems, to avoid these issues and keep the one of the most critical industry agricultural sector must adapt to the 21st century and beyond. Considering these reasons from preparing the land, seeding, maintaining to supply chain process embedded with the agriculture should be automated using new technology. It has now become success by integrating technologies like Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Modern Sensors, Drones, Automated robots and vehicles including tractors has now working on big farming lands by delivering expected results by keeping the quality, with the help of many projects and supports even technology sector and farmers this is now widely spreading and practically using in most areas in Europe Union and other continents, by making sure this industry has a bright future of sustainable agriculture and quality foods for everyone in the world.
References
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Towards Autonomy in Agriculture: Design and Prototyping of a Robotic Vehicle with Seed Selector
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Robotics and Automation in Agriculture: Present and Future Applications. Applications of Modelling and Simulation.
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