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Farmpilot Could Have a Bright Future

Farmpilot is a software to help farmers and contract farmers with their daily logistic tasks. It helps with planning at which location drivers and vehicles have to be at a certain time. It also helps tracking the fuel consumption, distance and area of the vehicle on the field and road – ordered by field and by customer. Contract farmers use this information for invoicing the landowners and farmers for paying their employees.

Many farmers use farmpilot already. Two of the biggest sugar producers in Europe, Nordzucker and Südzucker, have mandated the use of farmpilot for harvesting sugar beets (see page 3 of this PDF). Of course, farmpilot sends its data to the cloud. And – Arvato, the company developing farmpilot, has the cloud infrastructure in place.

Probably every terminal in a tractor or harvester comes with a task or job management. The manufacturers of these terminals should replace their home-grown solutions by farmpilot and save the development effort. There are three ways how to do that.

First, the farmpilot application runs on a tablet and communicates with the terminal over (W)LAN. The tablet has a mobile Internet connection and synchronises its data with the farmpilot servers in the cloud. The terminal relays data like fuel consumption, distance, harvested area and GPS coordinates from the CAN busses to the farmpilot application on the tablet. The driver interacts with the application solely on the tablet. This is most likely what we will see soon in the sugar industry.

Second, the application is mirrored to the display of the machine’s terminal via VNC – similar to MirrorLink, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for in-vehicle infotainment systems. The application still runs on the tablet or smartphone, but the user interacts through the terminal’s touch screen with it. This is more convenient for the driver, because the terminal is usually closer to the joystick and the steering wheel than the tablet.

Third, the farmpilot app runs on the terminal directly and communicates directly with the cloud servers. There is no need for an extra tablet or smartphone anymore. The app could use something similar to the AWS IoT Device SDK, which sends MQTT messages to the cloud and receives MQTT messages from the cloud in a secure way. Using a cross-platform GUI and application framework like Qt, Arvato could develop their app once and deploy it on all terminals, tablets, smartphones and PCs. This would be the best solution for the user and the solution with the least development effort.

This is not yet the bright future, but the necessary groundwork Arvato must do. In its current version, the farmpilot application relays a few CAN messages to the cloud. The infrastructure to forward every relevant CAN message from the engine, the harvesting header or the drive train to the cloud is in place. The farmpilot app is the gateway to all the data from the harvesters and tractors. Once this data is in the cloud, Arvato could run deep learning algorithms to find the right header or implement settings for an optimal yield or to detect machine defects early.

Now, this would be a bright future for farmpilot.

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