Meet Bakus: The future of sustainable viticulture

 Vitibot designs electric vine straddle robot that meets the challenges of sustainable viticulture

In recent decades, agriculture has faced the fundamental challenge of needing to increase food production and quality in order to meet the requirements of a growing global population. Similarly, viticulture has also been undergoing change. Several countries are reducing their vineyard areas, and several others are increasing them.

In addition, viticulture is moving towards higher altitudes and latitudes due to climate change. Furthermore, global warming is also exacerbating the incidence of fungal diseases in vineyards, forcing farmers to apply agrochemicals to preserve production yields and quality.

With robots in vineyard, they protect the health of winegrowers by keeping them away from chemicals…

Vitibot designs and produces electric robots for vineyards that are revolutionizing the work in the vines.
Because it runs on battery power, it doesn’t require any wires or cables to operate. This means that when it needs to recharge, The operator brings it back to the farm and simply plugs Bakus (name of the robot) on a charger. No muss, no fuss!

Theses robots are equipped with some pretty impressive features such as mechanical weed removal and automated vine pre-cutting, spraying or mowing.

It’s a concentrate of technology equipped with sensors and high-resolution cameras coupled with artificial intelligence. While many tasks can be handled locally, some processes require reliable and secure access to a private cloud.

How Move & Connect is helping Vitibot

To bring a gem of technology in rural areas, Vitibot needs to ensure that a cellular coverage will be efficient everywhere in the world. By partnering with Move & Connect, Vitibot would only need one type of SIM for all of it’s robots, and only one contract. Move & Connect’s global IoT cellular connectivity network would enable Vitibot’s vehicles to work out of the box, with more than 650 carriers in 200 countries.

Michael Fontanin - Chief Marketing Communications Officer says « Our connectivity needs are growing, all over the world. We have chosen a reliable, international and flexible solution for our requirements via Move & Connect. »

Vitibot’s lifecycle with Move&Connect

TESTING

Vitibot ordered a Move & Connect’s IoT SIM Card to begin a POC on a device and discover the IoT portal functionality.

ONBOARDING

After a successful trial period, Vitibot engineers worked with our pre-sales technical team to onboard their devices and make sure they can deploy it worldwide.

DEPLOYMENT

Setting up hundreds of SIM Cards has never been easier. Vitibot can easily install them and automatically activate them at the first activity of produced machine even if they sit idle for months. As soon as the activation is effective, real-time data are available as well as network event logs.

SUPERVISION

Webbing’s IoT portal allows Vitibot to monitor their devices and data usage all over the world with just one dashboard.

SCALING

When Vitibot wants to deploy in new places, they can rely on Webbing’s global coverage of 200 countries through more than 650 roaming agreements. Their technical team is also reassure to be supported by a friendly customer team available 24/7. 

Wherever they go, we follow.

SAVINGS

With Thales eUICC SIM Cards provided by Move & Connect, cellular profiles are remotely swapped so they never have to touch hardware or replace SIMs. Vitibot can manage profiles easily, download new profiles, and optimize costs directly in our Dashboard.

Conclusion

Deploying autonomous vehicles all around the world is a tremendous project. There are a lot of challenges to go through. To thrive, companies need to focus on their best work and be reassured that their MVNO (multiple virtual network operator) will back them up everywhere they wish to deploy. Bringing the eSIM technology on plastic and MFF2 SIM Cards coupled with a no commitment offer is the perfect combo to keep a peace of mind and a feeling of freedom.

Anytime you can swap provider while keeping our SIM Cards in your devices.