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Osram Urban Farming

Digitally manage the production of high-quality fresh food all year round

Technologies

Ruby on Rails, ReactJS

Industry

Agritech

Engagement Model

Dedicated Team

Platform

Web

Team

6 members

Timeline

3 years

About the project

Osram Urban Farming equips farmers with advanced digital tools to help them sustainably produce high-quality crops and food in urban areas.

This startup project has evolved inside a global high-tech company Osram with the support of our technical expertise.

Osram’s top-notch optical solutions and technologies are used by the world’s leading corporations, including NASA, and promote innovation in the economy’s industrial, consumer, healthcare, and automotive sectors.

Our expertise in agriculture software development, combined with Osram’s innovative approach to lighting technology and sensors, produced a unique farm management solution for smart and efficient crop care.

Osram Urban Farming Provides the Following Solutions:

They go out of their way to work and engage with the customer. The work completed by JetRuby was excellent, with the team handling the expanded scope professionally and producing high-quality deliverables. They were an engaged, committed team that worked hard to accomplish all tasks on time and by high standards.

Rodrigo Pereyra / business field manager at Osram

Challenges to overcome

We were excited to apply our skills as agriculture app developers in this project and build a complex solution to automate the farming process. Creating a universal and easy-to-use solution for farmers has put a few challenges further on:

Conducting proper research

The customer specified basic requirements for the project implementation. Before the development stage, we conducted thorough research and identified the goals of the process.

Making the app receive the data from sensors

The network of agriculture sensors collects data throughout the farm. To get the web dashboard to display the data (temperature, light, etc.), this information would follow from sensors through the cloud and finally reach the end-user. The quality of this connection and building a robust environment were critical to the success of this monitoring system.

Setting up a single cutting-edge dashboard

The digital farm management system must present the information & analytical dashboard in one easy-to-use interface and simultaneously enable adjustments of critical parameters. It was essential to design it as a universal “one-stop” platform.

Our work

The Internet of Things concept lies at the forefront of Osram Urban Farming, connecting sensors via a network to deliver data (weather conditions, soil quality, growth progress, environmental changes, and so on) to the end-user.

The development stage used Amazon Web Services to build serverless IoT applications that gather, process, and analyze field data rendered by devices. Finally, the farm management system was configured to be able to act on this data.

Setting up the data collection and exchange process was essential for the farm monitoring system. The data was extracted from a network of inexpensive, easy-to-install sensors. Once the cloud received data from sensors, it was forwarded to the web dashboard, and relevant alerts were sent to farmers.

This way, anomalies in crop growth could be easily spotted.The dashboard design highlighted crop productivity and alterations of this parameter to facilitate decision-making.

Enabling farmers to adjust necessary parameters with a click of a button was a perfect finish-up to the project.

Providing enough supply of light and an optimal light spectrum at all stages of plant growth is essential. At the same time, we aimed to elaborate on the energy-saving and cost-efficient light solution.

Implementation

A closed but flexible architecture was our choice for the joint project with OSRAM. It allowed putting into operation a wide range of sensor devices and operational units. Moreover, the network is easily scaled and enables connecting remote production sites into a single system.

Heavily-modified transmitters act as sensor devices. In particular, these devices were represented by hygrometers, air & soil thermometers, sensors for a permanent tracking of physical and chemical soil characteristics, weather stations, and sensors to measure the flow rate and filling level of the hydraulic systems. To prevent negative scenarios and increase yield, our AI systems additionally process images transmitted by drones and satellites.

The data from transmitters flows through several channels (LoRa, ZigBee, WiFi, Thread, Bluetooth) to local nodes and, finally, the cloud. The choice of the communication channel, the network topology, and architecture was based on the needs of the project. Reliability and cost performance are crucial factors considered by us during the setup of the data flow channels.

You can see the below scheme for the details:

To ensure data integrity, we used illuminometers and compact spectrometers as sensors. The information enters the server so that the neural network could generate the best possible combination of light for every single greenhouse.

Professional expertise sets a tone

Every project implemented by us would not be possible without advisory assistance of universities and agriculture experts. It’s required to properly understand the demands of each sort of plant, as well as the regional peculiarities of growing plants.  

New lighting modes are usually tested and trained on pilot cells of the project enterprise. More efficient setup and exploitation are possible thanks to the Machine Learning pipeline based on open-source libraries.

Business results

The idea of Osram Urban Farming turned into a bespoke and brand-new solution rooted in simplicity and high performance. During the first month of release, more than 50 contracts for the implementation were signed. By utilizing our solution, the farming business achieved a 32% crop yield increase.

By improving the quality of plant nutrition and growth through a smart dashboard, farmers could achieve more sustainable and ambitious goals with their production. We are proud to have developed the software product with rich potential for Osram, one of the leading producers of optical solutions.