Smart farming

17 April 2013 - Steer tractors with centimetre-accuracy to improve farming and the environment. Navtronics, a Belgium ESA Business Incubation Centre start-up company, is tailoring intelligent guidance for agricultural machinery using advanced satnav. As any other industry, the agriculture sector is always looking for ways to raise productivity and reduce labour cost through new technologies. One is the use of high-end Real Time Kinematic (RTK) satellite navigation to steer and control tractors and implements. RTK satnav increases the precision of position data derived from the Galileo, GPS and Glonass navigation satellite constellations. By using the 'phase' information of the signal's carrier wave, rather than just the satnav signal content, and combining this with a reference station for realtime corrections, Navtronics' systems can provide up to centimetre-level accuracy. This accuracy far exceeds manual steering, resulting in better use of available land and higher productivity from human and machine.