CCRI: Planning-M: Midwest Pivot Array for Autonomous Agricultural Sensing at Scale

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The Midwest Pivot Array is to be a shared platform for the advanced cyberinfrastructure research needed to help future farms, both large and small, use land, water, nutrients, and energy in more efficient ways to provide sustainable, healthy food and fiber for the world. The Pivot Array will be a rotating, center-pivot gantry able to provide autonomous, gigabit per second networking access over a large area (~100 acres) so that dozens of researchers can control experiments and receive the resulting data over an Internet connection. To cost-effectively provide operator-free access in all weather, 24x7x365, the Pivot Array is based upon a modern center-pivot irrigation gantry which will be upgraded with high-speed fiber networking and computing. It will provide plug-and-play connections for experimental agricultural sensors, sensor communications, software-defined radios, robotic devices, and machine learning-capable processors to support research on distributed computing, embedded systems, control of large-scale systems, networks, signal processing, wireless power transfer, and wireless communications. Applications include micro-meteorology, soil health, hydrology, crop breeding, phenotyping, and cropping systems management. The work of the Midwest Pivot Array planning grant is focused on community building among diverse stakeholder groups, including (1) university researchers and students; (2) industry partners working in networking, computing, wireless, and agricultural machinery; (3) agricultural input and service providers; (4) research farm managers; and (5) farmers. The project will capture the needs related to sensing and automation research that impact all aspects of wide-acre and specialty crop farming. This integration of a movable pivot gantry, fiber networking, and computing will result in the world's largest autonomous agricultural robotic sensing platform and overcome many bottlenecks that limit capacity for agricultural cyber-physical systems research today. In addition, by solving problems of data backhaul and precision field access, the Pivot Array will allow research on sensor systems, signal processing, and machine learning to proceed independently of innovations in autonomous unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. The sheer scale of the instrument and the data it will autonomously generate will help to democratize research by making sensing experiments and their data available to many stakeholder groups that do not have the resources to carry out field-scale agricultural research with present technology. Finally, the Pivot Array could pave the way for vastly expanded sensing capabilities for pivot systems that water more than 50 million acres in the United States. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.