1

A Case Study - Application of Drones in Agriculture using PAASMER IoT Platform

2

Introduction An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a Drone, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), or by several other names, is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. The flight of UAVs may operate with various degrees of autonomy: either under remote control by a human operator, or fully or intermittently autonomously, by onboard computers.

Compared to manned aircraft, UAVs are often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for humans. They originated mostly in military applications, although their use is expanding in commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications, such as policing and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography and agriculture. Civilian drones now vastly outnumber military drones, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015

Now, imagine the scenario where you could talk to a drone in flight.

3

Drones and IoT For those of you following the technology, you already know that unmanned aircraft systems (a.k.a. drones) are finding their way into Internet of Things (IoT) implementations. IoT applications are typically composed of:

A sensor “at rest,” e.g., on a highway or a bridge or a thermostat that gathers input (like weather conditions or seismic activity)

A connection (via the Internet) between the sensor and a back-end data collection infrastructure

A back-end data collection infrastructure that’s commonly based in the cloud

Can these Sensors or Sensor Arrays be attached to Drones?

Yes. Drone technology is evolving very rapidly. Drones are already beginning to efficiently replace the connected sensors at rest with one device that is:

deployable to different locations capable of carrying flexible payloads re-programmable in mission able to measure just about anything, anywhere

4

IoT and Drones in Agriculture One of the most promising areas for IoT is agriculture and usage of drones offer the potential for addressing several major challenges. With the world’s population projected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, experts expect agricultural consumption to increase by nearly 70 percent over the same time period. In addition, extreme weather events are on the rise, creating additional obstacles to productivity.

Agricultural producers must embrace revolutionary strategies for producing food, increasing productivity, and making sustainability a priority. Drones are part of the solution, along with closer collaboration between governments, technology leaders, and industry.

Drone technology will give the agriculture industry a high-technology makeover, with planning and strategy based on real-time data gathering and processing. Experts estimate the market for drone-powered solutions in agriculture is in the millions of Dollars range.

Some of the benefits of using Drones in Agriculture are given below.

One of the major benefits of drones in farming is ability to scout farm fields both quickly and efficiently. Rather than having growers evaluate fields’ manually on foot or by tractor, this technology allows farmers to gain immediate knowledge about the status of their fields in shorter periods of time. This information can be gathered whenever and wherever it is needed, minimizing the response time required addressing issues and maintaining crop.

ROI on Investment on Drones can be quickly recovered as this eliminates the costly and repetitive costs of hiring Manual labour or a crop duster plane to complete the above jobs.

GIS which stands for Geographical Information System which provides a permanent map highlighting the terrain, bad spots for irrigation, or where soil nutrients are too low which can be used by the farm to boost yields.

5

How Paasmer enables Drone Technology in Agriculture?

Paasmer is an IoT Platform from Mobodexter Inc. Paasmer allows you to connect any IoT device including drones, irrigation pumps, moisture / humidity sensors, sprinkler systems to the Internet.

Paasmer allows you to visualize the data collected from all the sensors and provides holistic view of the status of the farm, Irrigation efficiency, crop health, crop count and can apply various algorithms on it to predict the following.

Crop Yield. Harvest time. Disease profile and control. Irrigation plans.

6

Implementation: Irrigation System Here we look at an example of an irrigation system implementation using the Paasmer IoT platform using Drone with Thermal / Spectral camera, WifiAp’s and Irrigation Pumps.

The area of the farm(s) is divided into grids and each grid is assigned a number. The Drone is programmed to fly over the farm and take a photo over the grid which is sent back to Paasmer via Wifi AP.

The Paasmer Platform received the data from the drone and constructs a full image based on the numbering of each grid. It then applies some specific filters to create a heat map of the entire farm(s) in question.

This data is then presented to the user via the mobile app / website and can be used to control the irrigation pumps to water the grids where they are very dry.

Additionally, once the crop is growing, drones allow the calculation of the vegetation index, which describes the relative density and health of the crop.

7

About

MoboDexter, Co-Founded by Ex-Intel veterans in 2013 is based out in New York, Bangalore and Singapore. We are rapidly establishing itself as an innovative platform leader in the world of enterprise Internet of Things. In the booming and evolving Internet of Things market, MoboDexter has created a unique IoT platform to enable businesses to build their IoT products and solutions. PAASMER is a software suite that bundles all the elements needed to connect sensors, gateways, mobile application, cloud and analytics to develop, build and deploy connected IoT products quickly and efficiently. PAASMER’s end goal is to enable Artificial intelligence to “Things” so that Things are enabled with their own intelligence to act in the best interest of the user. Hence Machine learning and Deep learning are integral choices in the platform for our clients to leverage.

The unique aspects of PAASMER platform that differentiates our platform from other IoT Platforms in the market are

Best In Class High Speed Edge Database Innovative Edge Analytics Modular Edge OS Innovative Edge & Cloud Security Dynamic Cloud Management

MoboDexter is advised by Gartner Inc. In a recent Gartner survey, top 4 verticals seeing steep growth in IoT implementations are HealthCare, Connected Home, M2M & Retail. These are the same 4 verticals that are growth focus for PAASMER and has signed up clients across the world in each of these verticals. Our client implementations case studies are here.

Raconteur Online wrote - “MoboDexter’s IoT Platform as a Service, named PAASMER, and has been built with an inside-out approach from gateway upwards or downwards that makes it more versatile and flexible to integrate than existing platforms”

For more information visit: - www.mobodexter.com, www.paasmer.co.

Follow Us:-