To what extent can current French mobile network support agricultural robots?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how current French mobile network infrastructure can support large-scale deployment of agricultural robots, focusing on energy, environmental impacts, and coverage limitations based on data transmission needs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to assess energy consumption, carbon footprint, and coverage constraints for deploying agricultural robots on existing mobile networks.

Findings

Higher bitrate requirements significantly increase energy and environmental impacts.

Network infrastructure limits reduce the manageable agricultural area as robot data needs grow.

Impacts of increased data needs are non-linear and not well captured by simple models.

Abstract

The large-scale integration of robots in agriculture offers many promises for enhancing sustainability and increasing food production. The numerous applications of agricultural robots rely on the transmission of data via mobile network, with the amount of data depending on the services offered by the robots and the level of on-board technology. Nevertheless, infrastructure required to deploy these robots, as well as the related energy and environmental consequences, appear overlooked in the digital agriculture literature. In this study, we propose a method for assessing the additional energy consumption and carbon footprint induced by a large-scale deployment of agricultural robots. Our method also estimates the share of agricultural area that can be managed by the deployed robots with respect to network infrastructure constraints. We have applied this method to metropolitan France mobile network and agricultural parcels for five different robotic scenarios. Our results show that increasing the robot's bitrate needs leads to significant additional impacts, which increase at a pace that is poorly captured by classical linear extrapolation methods. When constraining the network to the existing sites, increased bitrate needs also comes with a rapidly decreasing manageable agricultural area.