IOT TECHNOLOGIES IN AGRICULTURE

oT smart agriculture products are designed to help monitor crop fields using sensors and by automating irrigation systems. As a result, farmers and associated brands can easily monitor the field conditions from anywhere without any hassle. Take a look at the different uses of IoT in agriculture by means of various IoT solutions:

ROBOTICS IN AGRICULTURE

Since the industrial revolution in the 1800s, automation got more advanced to efficiently handle sophisticated tasks and increase production. With increasing demands and shortage of labor across the globe, agriculture robots or commonly known as Agribots are starting to gain attention among farmers. Crop production decreased by an estimated 213 crores approx ($3.1 billion) a year due to labor shortages in the USA alone. Recent advancements in sensors and AI technology that lets machines train on their surroundings have made agrobots more notable. We are still in the early stages of an ag-robotics revolution, harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things in agriculture, with most of the products still in early trial phases and R&D mode.

Weeding Robots

These smart Agri robots use digital image processing to look through the images of weeds in their database to detect similarities with crops and weed out or spray them directly with their robotic arms. With an increasing number of plants becoming resistant to pesticides they are a boon to the environment and also to farmers who used to spread the pesticides throughout the farm. An estimated 13,000 kilograms (3 billion pounds) of herbicides are applied at a cost of 1,725 crores ($25B) each year, thus reducing their overall cost.

Machine Navigation

As remote-controlled toy cars are enabled with a controller, tractors and heavy plowing equipment can be run automatically from the comfort of home through GPS. These integrated automatic machines are highly accurate and self-adjust when they detect differences in terrains, simplifying labor-intensive tasks. Their movements as well as work progress can be easily checked on smartphones. With advancements in IoT in Agricultural and machine learning, these tech-driven motors are enabling Advanced farming using IoT independently with features such as automatic obstacle detection.

Harvesting Robotics

Utilizing agribots to pick crops is solving the problem of labor shortages. Working the delicate process of picking fruits and vegetables these innovative machines can operate 24/7. A combination of image processing and robotic arms is used by these machines to determine the fruits to pick hence controlling the quality. Due to high operational costs, crops that have an early focus on agribot harvesting are orchard fruits like apples. Greenhouse harvesting also finds applications with these bots for high-value crops like tomatoes and strawberries. These bots can work in greenhouses to aptly determine the stage of crops and harvest them at the right time.

Material Handling

Robots can perform dreaded manual labor tasks working alongside the labors. They can lift heavy materials and perform tasks like plant spacing with high accuracy, therefore optimizing the space and plant quality and reducing production costs.