Qualcomm heads for rural Dorset to test agri-bots (and maybe a nice jar of Scrumpy)
- Reference: 1616584811
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/24/qualcomm_dorset_5g_agribots/
- Source link:
Working in conjunction with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS) 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme, 5G RuralDorset said it wants to examine the use of 5G mmWave across a variety of potential use cases including crop-monitoring, livestock tracking, and limiting water consumption using IoT and robotics.
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The first test case is a planned 5G agri-robot tech platform, which RuralDorset hopes will be able to communicate with other units in real time, with data processing happening on-device rather than at a far-flung data centre. This would allow for speedier analytics and automation with relaitvely shorter latencies.
Test devices will use Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms and modems. 5G RuralDorset has not said what hardware it intends to use on the RAN and core end, although the organisation has previously partnered with local full-fibre ISP Wessex Internet and Vodafone UK.
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In a canned statement, Matt Warman, Minister for Digital Infrastructure, said it was trying to "seize the full potential of 5G to help the country build back better.
"Alongside the 5G RuralDorset project and backed by our £200 million trials scheme, we will explore innovative uses for 5G millimeter wave spectrum to revolutionise the agricultural sector."
Dave Happy, 5G RuralDorset's Security, Spectrum, and Collaboration, said the trials "aim to produce the world's first 5G-ready agri-robot."
Although 5G RuralDorset received over half (£4.8m) of [3]its £8m funding from DCMS as part of the £260m committed to digital infrastructure development in [4]last November's spending review , it is led by an independent consortium made up of Dorset Council and other industrial partners.
mmWave, huh? What is it good for?
The term mmWave refers to the swath of spectrum between 30GHz and 300GHz, although it is often used to describe bands above 24GHz. It offers several advantages over standard sub-6GHz when it comes to industrial and rural projects, most notably speed. Whereas sub-6GHz typically delivers bandwidth in the hundreds of megabits per second, mmWave connection speeds routinely measure in the gigabits.
Earlier this month, Turk Telecom claimed it recorded a world record for mmWave speeds, with one test showing [5]peak throughput of 4.5Gbps . This effort was made using the 26GHz spectrum on AirScale hardware made by Nokia.
Its biggest weakness is range. mmWave requires vastly more cellular base stations to cover the same area as a standard sub-6GHz connection. This is why [6]most planned UK rural 5G deployments have focused on using the slower but longer-range 700Mhz spectrum. One exception is Vodafone, which intends to use its existing 900MHz spectrum holdings.
To date, no commercial mmWave products have launched in the UK, in part due to the lack of spectrum availability. This may change in the coming years as Ofcom has [7]confirmed plans [PDF] to start consultations on its spectrum roadmap in the third quarter of 2021. Additionally, it has said it wants to start trials of deployments at 26GHz, which it described as " [8]the 5G mmWave Pioneer Band " [PDF].
For commercial uses, like those 5G RuralDorset wants to encourage, Ofcom has mooted making the 66-71GHz band available for unlicensed 5G usage. This would allow private deployments without the time-consuming and expensive process of obtaining spectrum licenses.
Qualcomm has said it hopes these trials will allow for further experimentation with mmWave technologies in the UK, leading up to larger widespread deployments.
In a statement, Wassim Chourbaji, senior veep of government affairs, said: "5G mmWave not only brings next-level mobile experiences to users, it can also deliver high-capacity wireless broadband access to urban, suburban, and rural settings. 5GRuralDorset will demonstrate how 5G mmWave can bring smart agriculture capabilities to remote farms.
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"The widespread use of 5G mmWave technology in the UK would mark a significant step towards bridging the current digital divide. It is an endorsement of mmWave's potential that alongside trials like this one in Dorset, we are already seeing strong commercial momentum for mmWave with a number of rollouts already taking place across Europe." ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFtwNqWlIPukRmTxgFg12QAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFtwNqWlIPukRmTxgFg12QAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://5gruraldorset.org/about-us/#funding
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/26/uk_autumn_spending_review_telecoms/
[5] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nokia-nok-spurs-turk-telekoms-network-with-record-5g-speed-2021-03-23
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/17/ofcom_second_5g_spectrum/
[7] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/209128/plan-of-work-202122.pdf
[8] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5G-update-08022017.pdf
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFtwNqWlIPukRmTxgFg12QAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Fitness for purpose?
Agriculture is becoming more automated and there are loads of companies working on autonomous systems to monitor thing like crop levels, weeds, soil condition etc. Getting reliable data into those remote rural areas is key to that sort of thing happening.
Re: Fitness for purpose?
I partially agree with you to be fair. Agricultural accidents tend to end up being fairly horrific in nature and it's an extremely hazardous job, often lone working with huge pieces of machinery there's a lot that can go wrong.
Also, having spoke to several farmers who are customers, I can confirm their tractors are 99.9% GPS guided and fairly automated already. If we have the technology for a Tesla to complete a 50 mile drive autonomously, I'm sure we can get some tractors/combine harvesters to run around a field of their own accord without human intervention.
Re: Fitness for purpose?
As someone with farming in the family, I wasn't talking about accidents. I was referring to unexpected events that take everything by surprise (freak weather, cows going wobbly for no apparent reason yet, hoards of bugs descending etc.).
The automation can only deal with what it has been taught to deal with, and it does that fine. An experienced farmer can deal with the entirely new and unexpected. That's what humans at best do best, which is how we've survived as a species for around 2M years without any help from electronics. Automation may well make life easier and work less hard (and in some cases even safer) but "laptop farming" has its own hazards that will emerge to dominate if it's adopted too widely.
Why 5G?
Given that the aim is for the processing to be done at the source, why does it need such high bandwidth?
And doesn't mmWave have a limited range, which would make something like Starlink for practical?
Re: Why 5G?
I was wondering the same. Agriculture applications are generally going to want low power, long range, highly robust connections, but with relatively low bitrate. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what mmWave can do, and sounds more like a job for 2G, maybe 3 if you're really data heavy.
I don't think Starlink would be relevant either though. The idea for these things is usually along the lines of having a tracker attached to every single cow, or large numbers of sensors distributed through a field to measure things like soil moisture everywhere continuously. Obviously Starlink stations are far too big, heavy and power hungry to work for that. They could maybe work as a central base station to connect the remote sensors to your office, but a regular 4/5G cell connection or microwave link would likely work just as well. Either way, the actual sensors and monitoring systems would be agnostic to how you choose to transmit from your central station.
Re: Why 5G?
I suspect the robots in question are from the Small Robot Company (www.smallrobotcompany.com) which take a truckload of pictures of a wheat field with the objective of using Machine Vision to spot the weeds. Really quite clever, but you can imagine that's an awful lot of pictures to send back to base for processing so 5G might be just the thing...
Brave New Something
Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
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There's Glory for you !
How about mmWave Wifi? One of the advantages of 5G is the efficient multichannel multiplexing but farm applications may have an extremely low density of terminals, so mmWave Wifi would be sufficient, and avoid the very high carrier subscription costs.
5G Antenna design
Is that a mmWave array he's holding in the picture? It looks remarkably like one of the drawings on Qualcomm's Patent Wall.
Fitness for purpose?
The technologies may be seriously cunning (they probably are) but the real world of agriculture, dealing as it does with living things in all their variability, is not likely to be the best place to deploy unthinking machines without human intervention. They are, and will be for the foreseeable future, unthinking, as we have so far not even managed to understand what makes a human really smart or really expert. Consequently we can't build those capacities into our machines.
I suspect that kit like this will work fine while everything is going normally, but will show its weaknesses when the unexpected occurs. Human farmers (the ones still in business) are however typically brilliant at dealing with the unexpected - that's the very nature of the job.