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

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: La Rocca, Pierre, Guennebaud, Gaël, Bugeau, Aurélie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author La Rocca, Pierre
Guennebaud, Gaël
Bugeau, Aurélie
author_facet La Rocca, Pierre
Guennebaud, Gaël
Bugeau, Aurélie
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10044
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To what extent can current French mobile network support agricultural robots?
La Rocca, Pierre
Guennebaud, Gaël
Bugeau, Aurélie
Computers and Society
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.
title To what extent can current French mobile network support agricultural robots?
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10044