RTLS - real time location systems : an inventory study for agriculture applications and requirements

Sammanfattning: The trend towards increasingly large farming units raises questions regarding how to better monitor production. Larger units make the impact from possible errors more severe, which increases the pressure on management supervision. To cope with management issues, prevent errors and handle increased demands on traceability and documentation, the Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) concept is making its way into various parts of agriculture. In sectors outside agriculture, RTLS are already being used successfully to track and locate items through nodes at different levels of accuracy, such as room level or the relative or absolute position. Empirical data can be received in real time from the nodes. Such systems are well established among dairy herds for feed management and automation. Their application in crop production is less well developed, though there are potential areas of application, such as digital recordkeeping of applied inputs, e.g. fertilizers and pesticides, and environmental monitoring to forecast disease outbreaks or give precise and automatic irrigation. RTLS can also be used to trace agricultural goods through the distribution chain to the end customer. This inventory study examines the state-of-the-art of available RTLS solutions for farming, in practice and in agricultural research. The study is based on material found in the literature and on interviews conducted with researchers and representatives of agribusinesses. Probable solutions for future applications include RTLS tracking of dairy cows with exact location capability using electronic passive ear tags. In crop production, RTLS for yield mapping and spatial environmental monitoring are seen as potential applications. Although possible solutions exist, it is clear that the knowledge of this technology is low in the business and further research is needed in order to raise sector awareness about RTLS applications in agriculture.