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12.18 Agriculture monitoring drone system

12.18.1 Description

Drone was originally developed for military purpose for surveillance of enemy troops. However, the drone is now used in a wide variety area specifically in sport, logistic, media, industry, and agriculture area. Since drone can be equipped with GPS flight assistance, Sensor, Radar, and Camera, it can detect abnormal action when it fly over the farmland and report the data to the administration centre. In addition, the drone can carry pesticides and spray over the crop to protect it from fungal infections.

Drone collects the information regarding the condition of farmland and crop and send the monitoring data to the administration centre. At agriculture administration centre, the aggregated data can be analysed and the information used for smart faming solution e.g., knowing how much fertilizer needs to be used, detecting what harmful insects are living in the farmland.

Drone is operated with battery power and after receiving command message from administration centre, it follows the action described in the command message e.g., modifying monitoring region coverage, coming back to the battery charging station. If a series of command messages are not delivered to each drone because of communication loss or if the message is delivered well but it malfunctioned then the desired actions are not performed. In order to prevent this situation, service transaction mechanism was introduced in the M2M platform. This use case is based on service transaction and this additionally introduces policy-based transaction rescheduling mechanism.

12.18.2 Source

REQ-2015-0607R01 Use Case for Agricultural Drone

12.18.3 Actors

  • Drone, which can monitor the condition of farmland and crop and report data to the administration centre through M2M platform. It also carry pesticides or fertilizer on the move to spray over the crop.
  • M2M Platform, which can manage the resources about drones and receive message from drone and deliver control message to the drone connected via access network.
  • Agriculture Monitoring administration Centre (AMC), which receive the data from drones for monitoring farmland and crops and send the command message to each drone for desired action.

12.18.4 Pre-conditions

None

12.18.5 Triggers

The battery level of one drone is low and needs to be recharged. In this situation, AMC sends the drone a command message which indicates the drone coming back. At the same time, AMC sends group of drones command messages which direct coverage modification about monitoring region.

12.18.6 Normal Flow

  1. All Drone are registered with M2M Platform and AMC sends control messages to each drone for monitoring the farmland and crop.
  2. If one drone's battery level become low, AMC gets this information and waits for sending the control message which indicates the drone with low level battery should come back to the battery charging station. If one drone come back to the charging station and then the number of drone monitoring the farmland decrease. Thus each drone needs to update its monitoring coverage. To this end, AMC waits for sending each drone control messages which indicate modifying its monitoring coverage.
  3. Because a series of command message is important, AMC initiates transaction triggering mechanism and sends command message to drone 1 - 6.
  4. In this situation, drone 1 - 5 responded with success information, drone 3 has a problem and responded with failure information.
  5. Because transaction mechanism was initiated, AMC sends the roll-back message to drone 1 - 6 which enables each drones to cancel the received command message and return to the previous status.

12.18.7 Alternative Flow

The alternative flow is about the scenario represents policy-based rescheduling mechanism.

  1. AMC initiates transaction triggering mechanism and sends command message to drone 1 - 6.
  2. In this situation, drone 1 - 5 responded with success information, drone 3 has a problem and responded with failure information.
  3. Based on the responding message from drone 1 - 6, M2M platform triggers transaction rescheduling mechanism referring to the transaction policy.
  4. Transaction group is created for transaction rescheduling for example, drone 1 - 3 are grouped with A, drone 4 - 6 are grouped with B.
  5. In this case, if drone 3 fails again as the same in previous situation, only drone 1 - 3 in Group A would be affected by the cancellation of the operation.

12.18.8 Post-conditions

None.

12.18.9 High Level Illustration

Figure 12.18.9-1 Agriculture monitoring drone system

Figure 12.18.9-1 Agriculture monitoring drone system

12.18.10 Potential requirements

  1. The oneM2M System shall support transaction management to multiple devices or applications providing policy based mechanism that should be invoked (e.g. keep status, re-schedule, rollback) depending on the outcome of the desired operation.