Perle IRG routers and IDS switches used to create VR environments

The project is intended to optimise and reduce the cost of crop variety plot trials, which are used by seed manufacturers to assess and develop sustainable types that are disease resist and deliver the best yield.

Christoph Tieben, Team Leader Robot-Control at DFKI comments: “The use of VR technologies opens several new possibilities, such as the immersive inspection of the plots, regardless of the trial location and cultivation period. Furthermore, the rating of plants in a virtual breeding garden opens the potential for interactive machine learning since the information can be saved and labelled for the creation of data sets. Automation or recommendation systems can be developed on this basis.”

DFKI has created a mobile sensing platform that consists of a battery-operated robot based on the Saga Robotics Thorvald Platform, named Valdemar, and a base-station container where Valdemar is protected from storms and vandalism while it uploads data and recharges the battery. Valdemar can travel over 4km in a recording campaign, covering an area of approximately 6,000m2, to capture around two Terabytes of data about plants at various stages of development using multiple sensors and cameras. This data is compressed and processed within the base-station container and then uploaded to the cloud-based data centre over 5G for further processing to create a three-dimensional map of the breeding garden within a VR environment.

In the development phase of Valdemar, the team at DFKI selected IDS-305-XT Industrial Ethernet Switches to connect sensors and cameras for data collection. The compact size of the IDS-305 fit perfectly into the constrained space, while its industrial design enabled reliable operation in this environment that is subjected to vibration, shock, and -40°C to 75°C temperatures. The IDS-305-XT plays a critical role in the backbone network by enabling real-time clock synchronisation of individual control components and ProfiNet support for the integration of a fail-safe PLC.

The second issue was the data upload to the base-station container followed by transmission to the cloud-based data centre. 

Tieben explains: “Because Valdemar is battery operated, and the base-station container is solar and wind-powered, the equipment installed needed to consume as little power as possible. For this job, we tested cellular routers from Perle, Cradlepoint, and Sierra Wireless. Perle’s power consumption was half of the competitive products. That, along with the fact that Perle did not have the SIM card recognition issues that we experience with the others, made our decision to choose the IRG Routers easy.”

Perle IRG routers are designed to operate on limited power sources by consuming less than 1W in idle mode and 52mW in standby mode. This makes them ideal for battery, solar, and wind-powered applications. They also meet all the environmental requirements with a small form factor, rugged die-cast aluminium IP54 enclosure, shock, and vibration resistance certified to MIL-STD-810G, and -40°C to 70°C operating temperatures.

An IRG5541+ LTE router is installed on Valdemar and an IRG7440 5G Router is located inside the base-station to maintain a continuous VPN LTE connection between the robot and the container. When Valdemar returns to base-station container, the data is automatically transferred using a local WLAN 6E network. The base-station processing equipment compresses and reduces the data before it is uploaded to the cloud-based data centre overnight using the Perle IRG7440 5G router.