Agricultural Automation

Early development of agriculture environmental control was mainly on technology integration, such as thermal insulation material, automation equipment, lighting source and efficiency, air-conditioning performance, and so on, to achieve “quality agriculture” which focused on greenhouse. In recent years, it turns to focus on the improvement of product quality, growth promoters, environment optimization, harvest rate improvement, and disease prevention, and so on. Through complete control of plant growth factors, a year-round crop production or planned production is created to execute "farming" mode. Lighting, air conditioning, culture fluid, and ambient temperature are fully controlled. It can be described as the "factory automation" of crop. This figure of speech is not an exaggeration at all.

Compared to the industrial automation environment, the owners who operate high-quality agriculture are mainly end users. Moreover, each crop growth environment has specific needs. Thus, the traditional standardized factory automation system cannot be directly introduced. The delicate agricultural development such as greenhouse involves some degree of "experiment" which must be more flexible in system adjustment. The system must show more completed and specific onsite information, in order to meet the owners’ unique requirements of “care.” Furthermore, most owners are not industrial automation engineers, so system control and information presentation must be "simple enough" so that the owners can adjust the system to cope with crop growth conditions.

Advantech indicates that the automation requirement of quality agriculture definitely focuses on "information" transmission and organization, and not on control. Therefore, more resources are put on sensor integration. I/O interface integration is a priority. In addition, quality agriculture and plant factory have high demand for information, so complete presentation through software interface is also an important topic.

Under the condition of distance and extensive environment, the top priority of system sensing and monitoring is communication. Of course, with cost consideration, wireless transmission does have larger advantage. This type of system is a rougher farming method, so the requirement of accuracy is more flexible. Compared to quality agriculture, its equipment planning is simpler, emphasizing on stability like wide temperature operation, energy saving, and long time operation.

Most of the companies still believe that the full “automation agriculture” is still a dream, and "farmers’" experience cannot be replaced. Advantech believes that automation equipment may provides information integration, environment monitoring, or farming program schedule, but crop growth conditions can only rely on "experience." "Agricultural growth condition, or issues like pests and diseases, needs the past experience to integrate. As for how to achieve the best, parameters of standardized equipment absolutely cannot solve all problems."