Integration of Communication, Positioning, Navigation, and Timing for Agri-robots

The UK agricultural sector is struggling to attract skilled workers to carryout essential agricultural tasks that were once saturated before the UK left the EU. On top of this current global events such as war and climate change have had a catastrophic effect on the agricultural supply chain. To help combat the shortages in labour the UK agricultural sector needs automate the farming role that have labour shortages. This is especially pertinent in roles such as crop harvesting where labour shortages are declining at an alarming rate. This could easily be rectified by replacing this labour shortage with autonomous harvesting machines.

A key issue in this area of automation is that some crops block out the mobile network signals that the robot uses to navigate from waypoint to waypoint. A solution to this is to develop a private 4G/5G mobile network solution to integrate communication, positioning, navigation, and timing (CPNT) to provide accurate CPNT for the robot to navigate from location to location.

A 4G private network will be firstly implemented to provide basic mobile coverage in no signal agri-fields scenario. Then we will integrate GNSS RTK services in application level. The next step is to use USRP B210 as 4G/5G base station to carry RTK correction data in the communication spectrum. Indoor positioning services using mobile signal strength, ToA, TDoA will be implemented afterwards. Fusion of sensor data to further calibrate positioning accuracy will be design and implemented.