XAG has developed drones, internet-of-things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital farming tools to help farmers effectively grow high-quality produce without exerting excessive environmental pressure on the planet. Specifically, with improved efficiency and user experience, 5G is expected to become a new catalyst to accelerate the development of intelligent agriculture.

Sponsored by the world's leading telecom supplier Huawei Technologies, the Huawei Cloud City Summit, under the theme 'Cloud for Good', was recently held in China's southern city Guangzhou to promote industry innovations driven by 5G technology. As a global agriculture technology company and industrial UAS manufacturer, XAG was invited to attend the summit to share its prospect of 5G-powered agriculture in collaboration with Huawei.

At the summit, Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG, gave a keynote speech to explain the company's multi-layer smart agriculture solutions. XAG has developed drones, internet-of-things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital farming tools to help farmers effectively grow high-quality produce without exerting excessive environmental pressure on the planet. Specifically, with improved efficiency and user experience, 5G is expected to become a new catalyst to accelerate the development of intelligent agriculture.

This July, XAG partnered with Huawei on a smart agriculture project in which the two companies initiated joint experiments to explore the potential applications of 5G, AI and Cloud Computing in agriculture.

Since 2016, XAG has joined hands with Huawei in developing the Agriculture IoT System (XIoT), which aims to rebuild the trust between producers and consumers with a more transparent, traceable food value chain. XAG's FarmMonitor and FarmCam can collect real-time meteorological and soil data, such as rainfall, wind speed, soil moisture and temperature, and capture HD field images to help farmers manage their lands more scientifically. These intelligent sensors are empowered with Huawei's communication and HiSilicon imaging solutions that enable high-resolution, smooth monitoring of crop growth status while saving a huge amount of data usage.

5G has the potential to transform agriculture, as the development of smart farming is heavily dependent on both mobile internet and automated devices to achieve real-time, precise production and management. XAG's cooperation with Huawei is expected to expand throughout the entire production system, with the emphasis on leveraging 5G technology to seamlessly interconnect people and a vast diversity of smart agricultural devices in new level of performance, cost-efficiency and immersive experience.

With a much higher peak data rate, lower latency and massive capability, 5G can not only raise the speed and precision of data transmission and processing but also improve the control accuracy and stability of drones and robots. When 5G combines with AI and cloud computing, new production scenarios such as live video monitoring, remote diagnostics and on-site prescription would emerge to enable precision agriculture.

For example, geographic and imaging data captured by XAG's surveying drones can be real-time processed in the cloud, while Agriculture Intelligence (XAI) can immediately analyse those data to generate AI prescription maps on site to achieve the Variable-rate Application (VRA) of the plant protection drones or other automated agri-machineries.

During the past six years, XAG has developed a fully autonomous plant protection drone to replace physical labour on seeding, fertilising and chemical spraying. This means that a large amount of agricultural production data, including field edges, landforms, object location, crop growth, flight path and spraying dosage, have been accumulated for AI analytics and deep learning.

Moreover, the partnership between XAG and Huawei will also take further steps to elevate the agricultural application of IoT to a new height. With 5G and cloud computing, the growing condition of croplands would be streamed via live videos on mobile phones to improve farmers' crop management experience and alleviate consumers' concern on food safety. Farmers can conduct remote crop disease diagnosis more accurately without staying by the fields and sweating all over. And consumers will be well informed by the produce traceability system so that the trust gap between consumer and producer will close.

Since 2013, XAG has leveraged its smart agriculture technologies to serve over 4.7 million farmers worldwide and conducted precise, cost-effective UAS crop protection on more than 6 million hectares of farmlands. With the deepened cooperation with Huawei, XAG will strive to interconnect all its intelligent devices, including drones, sensors and robots, through 5G, AI and cloud computing to achieve automated agriculture and smart farming.