The agriculture sector faces unprecedented challenges in the form of climate change, labor shortages, and rising food demand. To address these issues head-on, SmartCow, a leading player in AI engineering, is introducing a groundbreaking smart spray system. This system is designed to transform conventional farming into a more efficient and sustainable practice.
Traditional agriculture relies heavily on manual labor and imprecise methods for tasks like irrigation and pest control. With the average age of farmers increasing, and a shortage of young talent entering the industry, there is a pressing need for innovative solutions that can boost productivity and reduce operational risks.
SmartCow has partnered with a U.S.-based customer to develop a state-of-the-art smart spray system that seamlessly integrates with commercial-grade tractor boom sprayers. This cutting-edge system offers precise liquid delivery, efficient coverage, and the ability to treat vast agricultural areas swiftly. It also reduces the reliance on manual labor and enhances operator safety.
The smart sprayer solution integrates MARS, SmartCow’s in-house NVIDIA Jetson AGX OrinTM embedded IoT system, and 12 camera sensors with the original spray system. The new solution enables accurate data collection and sophisticated analytics for intelligent decision-making based on plant condition measurements. The heart of this innovation lies in the AGX Orin platform, which offers exceptional computing power of up to 275 trillion operations per second (TOPS). It can seamlessly operate multiple high-resolution cameras in real-time, allowing precise monitoring and control of agricultural operations.
MARS is available with Wi-Fi and 4G/5G connectivity. This enables the integrated smart spray system to efficiently communicate from the field to the farmer’s control center. Also, the system supports out-of-band (OOB) power cycling and OS recovery, eliminating the need for manual maintenance during network disruptions. This innovation optimizes spray conditions for enhanced crop production. It also offers up to 20% computing performance improvement compared to the previous idea of using NVIDIA Jetson AGX XavierTM as core computing platform, resulting in cost reductions of up to 40%.
Smart farming is a viable solution to the challenges of climate change and labor shortages in agriculture. The smart sprayer integration between SmartCow and their U.S. based customer is a significant step towards a more productive and sustainable agriculture industry. As computing power grows, the potential for smart farming to revolutionize agricultural production becomes even more promising.
