Real-time Smart Farming with 5G
AI is conducting real-time networked systems and processes of Smart Farming (SF) using 5G in order to provide a previously unavailable information base for decision-making in agriculture that is critical for success and sustainability. Specifically, the project demonstrates the potential of 5G in agriculture under realistic conditions by using the smart fertilization use case. Environmental and plant data are collected and transmitted to the Edge-Cloud, which is the core element of the 5G-PreCiSe environment, using sensors immediately before and during the fertilization process. Using additional data from various sources (e.g. satellite images) and simulation models, the Edge-Cloud calculates the optimal fertilizer needs for the management zone currently being traversed by the farming machine through rule algorithms and feeds the information back to the farming machine.
For this process to occur from data collection to fertilization in real-time, 5G is required as a fast communication medium. In the project, smart fertilization serves as an exemplary use case. In addition, using 5G, the concepts developed in the project for connecting sensors, actuators, data sources, cloud services, and simulation models in a data mesh will be extended to other use cases in agriculture.
