Ceres : National Agro-Infrastructure for Irrigation Mgmt

Ceres (Hera-Release)

This is a demo package of the Hera release of the Ceres farm operating system.

The Ceres project is an exploratory experiment to figure out a low-cost turnkey infrastructure in a national scale can avert the scourge of climate change in the poorest of countries around the world. Although this is an Indian story, there is a resonance of the same challenges across Equatorial & Sub-Saharan Africa, South-Asia, Latin America & South East Asia.

Introduction

The Hera release is an exploratory experiment to figure out what kind of a low-cost IoT infrastructure is required to delopy AI-based precision farming across farms in emerging countries. The experiments in architecture, platforms & technologies here, are the intial steps toward a highly distributed, remotely deployable IoT host operating system running on a broad set of real-time OS (including Arduino, RTOS, Windows-Embedded & Linux), spread across farms in the emerging countries.

Related Reading

Artificial Intelligence & IoT

• How sensors, robotics and artificial intelligence will transform agriculture

• Can artiticial intelligence help feed the world

• When artificial intelligence met peach

• Drones, tractor hacks and robotic sprayers: the technology of farming

• John Deere is plowing IoT into its farm equipment

• A Skunk Works with tractors: Inside John Deere’s IoT-innovation unit

Food Secuity & Impact of Climate Change

• Our dying rivers

• After 47 years, water level hits rock bottom at KRS

• Depleting water level in Neyyar dam raises concerns

Objective

Hera is a feasibility study for Zeus, that answers the following questions:

• Is it possible to automate a remote rural farm entirely using IoT?

• It it possible to remotely administer, upgrade and reprovision it entirely through mobile phone or internet?

• Is it possible to automate a farm at $0.1/sqft?

Conclusions

We are now optimistic that the objectives can be achieved. However, we will need to significantly modify our original architecture.

Status

Phase 1 - Skunkworks/Technology Evaluation (Aug-Oct 2017)

*Status - Architecture unsatisfactory. (as of Oct 12, 2017)*

A prototypical version of Hera has been developed as part of Ceres (version 0.3). This however has not achieved our design goals. The implementation of Ceres on ESP8266, our target platform needs to be significantly optimized. Memory limitations on the ESP8266 significantly curtails the implementation of our solution. We are looking into topograpical, architectural and/or platform (move to ESP32) changes to work around the limitations.

Hera now involves over 120k LOC. As such, the current image is unstable because it uses 78% of the global memory. The Hera version will need to be trimmed down by another 20% for it to be considered stable. The next version of the software, available by Jan 2018 will be a significantly slimmed down version of this operating system.

We are abandoning our current design and going back to the drawing board.

Phase 2 - Hera Re-Implementation (Jan-Apr 2018)

*Status - Unplanned (as of Oct 12, 2017)*

Package

Included in this package are:

• src/nodeos - Sourcecode for the final Ceres sketch (generated from base sourcecode on sourceforge into a single file ceres.node.h).

• bin/appemu - RAD development tool for Ceres LUA applications (individual applications in lua files in the directory).

• src/prototypes - Interface samples to Arduino devices (temperature sensors, moisture sensors and relay actuators for pumps and motors.)

Concept

Project Outline

For an outline of the project description, checkout the wiki page on sourceforge.

Contact

For more details, contact us at:

• [sreekant.sreedharan at yahoo.com] or

• [msureshkumars12 at gmail.com]

Related Links

• Ceres Wiki Page

• Project Profile - Ceres Farm Operating System

• Project Profile - Empact Foundation Class Library

• Documentation - Ceres Class Library Reference

• Documentation - Empact Class Library Reference