I-Corps: Pulsepod: Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Increasingly, fewer people are managing more land under tighter resource restrictions. Water and labor top the list of constrained resources, but growers also face more demands on their time, more complex operations, and more uncertain weather. Most generally, growers hire consultants to frequently check fields and make decisions. Increasingly, these consultants rely on sensor data to prioritize which fields to visit. There exists hardware for measuring weather and soil moisture, for example to schedule irrigation, and some of this hardware has the capability of offloading data to a cloud database for users to view. Hardware companies are often focused on selling a single sensor - such as soil moisture - rather than providing a complete solution to all a grower?s decision-making needs. The proposed innovation synthesizes in-field sensor data with satellite remote sensing and weather forecasts to provide alerts, notices, and advice on upcoming jobs to do. Because the proposed sensor hub is flexible, the variety of decision support options is larger than its competitors. This I-Corps team has developed a low-cost cellular-enabled pod (Pulsepod) that is 10x less expensive than comparable products on the market. Pulsepod is a small, low-power, low-cost sensor platform designed for global applications in the environmental sciences. A variety of self-describing sensors can be plugged into the main hub to address a variety of questions, generally focused on the responses of plants to their environment. Data is transmitted over cellular, wifi, or even satellite networks onto a cloud-based software platform to allow real-time remote decision support. Existing technologies are expensive, hard to use, and not well integrated to the internet. By contrast, Pulsepod is economical, easy to use, and explicitly designed to get data onto the cloud.