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Digital Farming and Field Robotics: Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data

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Fundamentals of Agricultural and Field Robotics

Part of the book series: Agriculture Automation and Control ((AGAUCO))

Abstract

In recent years, agriculture has been facing an increasingly urgent demand to increase food production while reducing the use of various farming inputs such as nutrients, water, and labor. Many scientific disciplines are joining forces in order to accomplish this aim. From a technical perspective, precision farming is offering optimized infield performances. Although the technical capabilities of machinery performing infield operations are already well developed, the precision and the efficiency of the agricultural tasks could be further enhanced by smart farming technologies offered by the new digital era. The digital transformation of agriculture is being facilitated by the emergence of technologies focused on data acquisition and data management, which are expected to have a profound impact on everyday decision-making. Widely used precision farming techniques and tools, combined with technological developments in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and innovative big data analytics, are expected to revolutionize farming. This agricultural revolution, in many cases, is being referred to as “Agriculture 4.0” or “Digital Farming.” This chapter is presenting basic principles and overview of the relevant technologies such as IoT, cloud computing, and big data as it applies to agriculture. The emerging trends of each of these technologies that could potentially have a substantial effect in the agricultural domain are also discussed. In an effort to describe this Digital Farming ecosystem, the conceptual architecture that integrates all mentioned technologies is defined together with a vision on how these relevant components need to be interconnected in the future so that Agriculture 4.0 can be turned into a reality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

    Dimitrios S. Paraforos & Hans W. Griepentrog

Authors
  1. Dimitrios S. Paraforos
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  2. Hans W. Griepentrog
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Correspondence to Dimitrios S. Paraforos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Biological Systems Engineering, Washington State University, Prosser, WA, USA

    Manoj Karkee

  2. Biological Systems Engineering, Washington State University, Prosser, WA, USA

    Qin Zhang

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Paraforos, D.S., Griepentrog, H.W. (2021). Digital Farming and Field Robotics: Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data. In: Karkee, M., Zhang, Q. (eds) Fundamentals of Agricultural and Field Robotics. Agriculture Automation and Control. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70400-1_14

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