Agriculture Automation
The California Strawberry Commission is committed to digitizing and enhancing field equipment, including tractors and other machinery, with the aim of achieving significant cost savings. These efforts support growers in California, who are responsible for 90% of strawberry production in the United States.
Edgenesis helped California Strawberry Commission:
- Annually save of $32 million lost through the implementation of IoT edge AI solutions
- Reduce 80% of development time to collect data from field tractors to cloud BI
- Be able to scale the solution to 10k tractors in the field
Challenges
Data scientists, while not experts in edge device development, aim to optimize field tractor operations to enhance growers' efficiency and mitigate financial risks they've identified. The current solution they are trying is Arduino based, while it faces limitations in development, scalability and deployment.
- Slow Device Integration, it takes months for a data scientist to integrate all the device with an edge AI unit
- The Arduino-based solution is not easy to scale when additional sensors or functionalities are required in the future.
- The connection and data push logic is unreliable from Arduino to the cloud. Data will very easily be permanently lost during this process.
Edgenesis Solution
Device virtualization
By converting physical devices into Kubernetes pods, Edgenesis simplifies the onboarding process. Now, adding a new device to the system can be done with a single command, reducing setup time and complexity.
Edge node scalability
Employ K3s cluster management to ensure that edge nodes can scale as needed. This allows for seamless expansion and contraction of resources, making the system highly adaptable to varying workloads.
Custom data processing
The telemetry service is designed to process data according to specific needs. It can automatically trigger data push to the cloud, enabling real-time analytics and decision-making.
Reliable data transmission
The telemetry service incorporates edge node caching and a retry mechanism to ensure reliable data transmission to the cloud. This minimizes data loss and ensures that critical information is securely and accurately transmitted.
Result
With the support of Edgenesis, California Strawberry Commission was able to connect to real-time data from 10,000+ bug-vacuum tractors in the field, allowing AI predictions that helped strawberry growers optimize tractor use and avert potential revenue loss.
