Application platform for agricultural processes in rural IoT operations and control of captive airships

Abstract

Brazil has a considerable and growing agricultural area, reaching 71 million hectares in 2016, with a projection of expansion to 75 million in 2017 (IBGE, 2016), with a comparative advantage in soil, water and climate. Still, livestock farming accounted for 29 million cattle slaughtered in 2016 (IBGE, 2016). These figures help to understand the reason why 23% of the national GDP is the result of agribusiness, meaning that R $ 1.1 trillion of the wealth produced in the country came from agriculture and livestock. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become popular as a technology present in the agroindustry, allowing sensors to be placed throughout the crop and herd, as well as controlling agricultural machines remotely. This technological evolution generates an increase in productivity, quality and agility of agricultural processes. The increasing arrival of the connectivity to the field has enabled the real time mapping of the equipment involved in the harvesting, soil analysis and harvest through images, besides the monitoring of herd health. However, the connectivity infrastructure is still limited and therefore becomes a bottleneck for operations that depend directly or indirectly on the Internet, such as transmitting sensor data to databases and accessing applications to such information.3G rural connections reach only two out of ten Brazilian rural producers. On the other hand, Mateus Barros, the commercial leader of the Climate Corporation in South America, reports that in the US, all rural equipment operates online, but that in Brazil Climate had to adapt and leave the operation offline, since the supply of Connection in the Brazilian countryside is scarce (Barros, 2017)."If the producer is not connected, he can not see the information [transmitted by field sensors] and he can not see it. Cancel or redirect the operation to another area, "says Mariana Vasconcelos, partner of Agrosmart, one of the agtechs in action in the country. "Having information online is the difference in response time to a situation" (BARROS, 2017)The captive airships developed by ALTAVE are a possible solution for flying with LPWA radios for embedded IoT purposes, creating an application platform that can use the data generated by the sensors on the ground. Today ALTAVE has a developing system that receives data from balloon sensors and controls the movement and flight safety systems. This system, called HMS (Health Monitoring System), serves as the basis for the development of the project in question. The application platform consists of the collection and transmission of IoT radios data together with the flight parameters of the captive balloon. This information is sent to the Internet / Cloud and downloaded to a server. The database server will be made available to third party applications, such as companies specializing in the analysis of agricultural data, as well as allowing access to data by ALTAVE's own software development and management department. In this way, the application platform does not restrict its use to the aerostats developed by ALTAVE and the application developers who have ALTAVE's permission to access the data. (AU)