I-Corps: Pulsepod: Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth

越来越少的人在更严格的资源限制下管理着更多的土地。水资源和劳动力是最受限制的资源，但种植者也面临着更多的时间需求、更复杂的操作和更不确定的天气。大多数情况下，种植者雇佣顾问经常检查田地并做出决定。这些顾问越来越依赖传感器数据来优先考虑哪些领域需要访问。目前已有用于测量天气和土壤湿度的硬件，例如用于安排灌溉的硬件，其中一些硬件具有将数据卸载到云数据库以供用户查看的能力。硬件公司通常专注于销售单一的传感器——比如土壤湿度——而不是为所有种植者提供完整的解决方案。S决策需要。拟议中的创新将现场传感器数据与卫星遥感和天气预报相结合，提供警报、通知和即将要做的工作建议。由于所提出的传感器中心是灵活的，各种决策支持选项比其竞争对手更大。这个I-Corps团队开发了一种低成本的蜂窝吊舱（Pulsepod），比市场上同类产品便宜10倍。Pulsepod是一款小型、低功耗、低成本的传感器平台，专为环境科学领域的全球应用而设计。各种自描述传感器可以插入到主中心，以解决各种问题，通常集中在植物对其环境的反应上。数据通过蜂窝、wifi甚至卫星网络传输到基于云的软件平台上，从而实现实时远程决策支持。现有的技术价格昂贵，难以使用，而且没有很好地与互联网集成。相比之下，Pulsepod经济实惠，易于使用，并且明确设计用于将数据传输到云端。

Increasingly, fewer people are managing more land under tighter resource restrictions. Water and labor top the list of constrained resources, but growers also face more demands on their time, more complex operations, and more uncertain weather. Most generally, growers hire consultants to frequently check fields and make decisions. Increasingly, these consultants rely on sensor data to prioritize which fields to visit. There exists hardware for measuring weather and soil moisture, for example to schedule irrigation, and some of this hardware has the capability of offloading data to a cloud database for users to view. Hardware companies are often focused on selling a single sensor - such as soil moisture - rather than providing a complete solution to all a grower?s decision-making needs. The proposed innovation synthesizes in-field sensor data with satellite remote sensing and weather forecasts to provide alerts, notices, and advice on upcoming jobs to do. Because the proposed sensor hub is flexible, the variety of decision support options is larger than its competitors.This I-Corps team has developed a low-cost cellular-enabled pod (Pulsepod) that is 10x less expensive than comparable products on the market. Pulsepod is a small, low-power, low-cost sensor platform designed for global applications in the environmental sciences. A variety of self-describing sensors can be plugged into the main hub to address a variety of questions, generally focused on the responses of plants to their environment. Data is transmitted over cellular, wifi, or even satellite networks onto a cloud-based software platform to allow real-time remote decision support. Existing technologies are expensive, hard to use, and not well integrated to the internet. By contrast, Pulsepod is economical, easy to use, and explicitly designed to get data onto the cloud.