Smart Agriculture & Ocean Systems
In Japan, the number of workers in primary industries continues to decline, highlighting the need for ICT and IoT technologies to enable sustainable resource utilization and industrial growth. However, the lack of communication infrastructure in remote agricultural areas and at sea has delayed the progress of smart industrialization.
Our research explores smart agriculture and ocean systems enabled by off-grid communication technologies, focusing on satellite-based connectivity to support sensing, control, and data-driven intelligence in infrastructure-limited environmen
Off-Grid Smart Agriculture Using LEO Satellite Communication
We constructed a smart agriculture education and research field at the Suzukakedai campus. A new field server and a stable power supply network were deployed to enable two-way communication in an off-grid environment.
By leveraging LEO satellite communication, including STARLINK mini, the system supports continuous sensing and remote operation. Using the collected data, we designed an automatic tractor operation system, demonstrating the feasibility of smart agriculture in infrastructure-limited environments.
Fig.10 Smart agriculture field at the Suzukakedai campus with LEO satellite-based communication infrastructure.
Ocean Sensing and Fish Amount Estimation via Satellite Communication
In ocean environments, we demonstrated continuous transmission of sonar sensor data using STARLINK mini, evaluating both communication performance and power consumption. Based on the collected sensing data, we developed a machine learning model to estimate fish amounts from sonar measurements.
Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves an R² score of 0.89, demonstrating the effectiveness of satellite-enabled ocean sensing and data-driven estimation.
Fig.11 Fish amount estimation results based on sonar sensing data, achieving an R² score of 0.89.
SAKAGUCHI & TRAN LAB
