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the australian farmer
Accelerate time to market They can use their own experience to design equip- ment that is uniquely matched to their location, the crop they grow, and the farming methods they choose. They don’t need to reinvent the wheel for each machine; they can simply buy components and assemble these into a bespoke new machine. There are now standard off-the-shelf products that combine precision antenna engineering, ad- vanced radiofrequency skills, and high-accuracy GNSS, plus cellular and direct-to-cell (DTC) Star- link-compatible connectivity. These easy-to-in- tegrate solutions can be used by farmers and solutions integrators without specialist know- ledge. The requirement to deploy and maintain RTK base stations has also been democratised into a seamless, online global RTK service that is afford- able for mass-scale deployments where everything on the farm can now be tracked with precision. Farmers that are building specialised robots based on their terrain, use case, and existing mechanical knowhow can innovate based on their skills and turn to suppliers to provide all the com- plex electronics components, such as smart GNSS antennas. This means they are free to focus on their unique robot’s design instead of the technical challenges of radiofrequency, GNSS, and antenna. The industry is now taking the approach of using critical, difficult to engineer technologies as off-the-shelf building blocks instead of buy- ing or developing discrete solutions. This is help- ing to democratise precision and abstract away time-consuming design work required for RTK- level GNSS. We’re truly in an era where plug and play solutions are becoming mainstream.
maintain. In many cases, traditional vendor engin- eers can be days away from a repair appointment which is unacceptable for farmers with crops ready to harvest that are degrading by the hour. Innovative approaches to precision agriculture are unlocking new capabilities and enabling farms to optimise operations. Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology is at the heart of this be- cause it enables accurate positioning of vehicles, ro- bots, and cattle and helps to precisely position robot swarms for seeding and fertilizer distribution. The technology is now widely available and has become significantly more affordable in recent years, broad- ening its appeal even for lower value use cases. There are two sides to the market for GNSS-en- abled positioning. The mass-market is for positioning that is accurate to tens of centimetres. These solu- tions utilise GNSS to locate animals, vehicles, and other equipment with acceptable accuracy. They also support accurate location of fertiliser in areas of fields that need additional coverage, for example. Precision as-a-service The next step is high-precision GNSS which can achieve accuracy down to the centimetre level. This is an essential enabler for accurately drilling seeds or for a robot to prune a grapevine without damaging the plant. The enabling technology be- hind this is real-time kinematic (RTK) correction, which utilises additional stations on the ground to correct errors in GPS data and thereby makes loca- tion positioning more accurate. RTK correction typically involves either investing in an RTK base station and receiver or using only RTK receivers and publicly available RTK signal networks. For many farmers, it’s simpler and eas- ier to use an RTK correction service that abstracts away all the complexity of managing GPS signals. That ability to engage with cutting-edge technol- ogies without having to master them is a key driver behind current agricultural innovation. Farmers recognise that they don’t have to become radiof- requency engineers to operate a robot swarm on their properties. They can simply buy-in the com- mercial off-the-shelf (COTS) GNSS building block assemblies and fast track their custom designs.
Mark Winton is APAC GNSS Business Development Manager at Quectel Wireless Solutions.
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