Deere & Company, doing business as John Deere, is an American corporation that manufactures agricultural machinery, heavy equipment, forestry machinery, diesel engines, drivetrains (axles, transmissions, gearboxes) used in heavy equipment and lawn care equipment. It also provides financial services and other related activities.
In her article Stacey Higginbotham points out:
Tracy Schrauben, a manufacturing emerging technologies manager at John Deere, told me the goal is to make factories wireless so it’s easier to reconfigure work stations whenever products or plans change. Doing so will save time and money in the form of extra cabling and Ethernet drops. The factories also have thousands of devices — among them handheld drills, loaders, and more — that can wander from station to station (either intentionally or not), and using wireless technologies to track that equipment saves time and money, too.
A reliable wireless network also enables machinists to get more data off of the company’s equipment. For example, John Deere has attached sensors to welding equipment in the hopes of getting data that can be used to train an algorithm on the best welds. Other examples of the benefits of attaching wireless sensors to equipment include getting vibration or sound data from machines to feed back into a predictive maintenance algorithm. Wiring up some of this gear would be prohibitively expensive or impossible.
One project that Schrauben has implemented with the help of Jason Wallin, principal architect at John Deere, is measuring exactly how much torque is behind every bolt that holds the pieces of the X9 1100 combine together. Sensors on handheld power drills and sensors on robot arms track torque to ensure every bolt is optimally tightened.
The handheld equipment currently uses Wi-Fi chips inside the power drills to send data. But Wi-Fi is power-hungry. It also uses unlicensed spectrum that can get congested and become unreliable, especially in factory settings with huge metal equipment in the way and a lot of interference from nearby devices including microwaves.
The end goal for John Deere is to move as much equipment as possible to cellular and, eventually, to a custom 5G network built on the company’s Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum. Wallin told me that Deere expects the number of sensors in the factory to grow 20 times from where it is today, and that it will need the density provided by 5G networks. Schrauben, meanwhile, is looking forward to the location-tracking options available in 5G networks that are still to come in the wake of Release 17 being approved this past June. They’re both still waiting for the appropriate end nodes and equipment that can support 5G and the CBRS spectrum. Dongles plugged into machines in the Deere test lab provide connectivity in the meantime.
Both Wallin and Schrauben are also hoping to see vendors support 5G in the CBRS band on laptops, handheld devices, and industrial gateways. Wallin was especially excited to show me a Dell laptop that worked in the CBRS band without requiring a dongle.
And to get a sense of how much they want to put on the cellular network and how much they trust it, Jason Ryan, a technologist focused on manufacturing and emerging tech at Deere, told me he’d like the programmable logic controllers, which are currently wired, to support eventual 5G over CBRS. That’s a bold ask. I’ve heard nothing from Siemens, Rockwell, Schneider Electric, or any other programmable logic controller (PLC) vendors about wireless PLCs.
I found the call for wireless PLCs surprising because they are the brains of very expensive and often dangerous machines. They need to respond reliably and quickly while also staying secure. And wireless is rarely perceived as being any of those things. But the Deere team believes that it can make most of its operations wireless using its own cellular network, which it controls, and future 5G with sub10-millisecond latency.
Today it is running 14 LTE microcells in the Moline Harvester plant, which provide coverage for about a third of the facility. Those 14 microcells offer the same density as 100 Wi-Fi access points, Wallin told me, and even that’s overkill for the plant’s current needs. There are some 200 devices on each microcell, which deliver 100 Mbps and latencies of about 10 milliseconds, according to Wallin, who added that the current cellular network cost about 75% of the wired infrastructure it replaced.
To build this network, John Deere grew its wireless department by 20% and worked with its cellular equipment vendor (the name of which it did not share) to spec out and do the initial build. The result is that it now has the experience and airwaves to essentially operate its own telco network inside the Moline plant. Going forward, it plans to expand those efforts to its other plants in the U.S. and to investigate spectrum deals in Mexico, Germany, and India, where it has other manufacturing facilities.
Based on the successful experience of deploying Private 5G networks, MWL reported that John Deere outlined plans to launch its first private 5G network in a new factory in Brazil last year. The article notes:
With significant investments in laser cutters and machine tools with a service life of between ten years and 20 years, Wallin stated John Deere is not making a full move to mobile, rather beginning a private 5G network move.
It currently uses two 4G networks and a standalone (SA) 5G set-up at its headquarters in the US, an approach Wallin said is a blueprint for building mobile networks.
He noted before John Deere uses SA 5G networks in its facilities, the device ecosystem needs to mature.
John Deere began its Industry 4.0 effort in 2019 when it bid for CBRS priority access licences in areas of the US where the company has most of its manufacturing footprint.
It first worked with Nokia to get a handle on how CBRS spectrum could be used, but the end goal is for John Deere to manage the private networks.
The company has 18 private networks across the US, South America and Europe, with some of them deployed in production mode.
Wallin stated the killer use case for private 5G networks is moving manufacturing parts around facilities. Cranes and overhead machinery sometimes pause as they go from device-to-device due to limitations of Wi-Fi networks.
“As we move towards autonomy in the factory, it becomes problematic, especially when you get into a life safety issue waiting for something and then suddenly your latency bumps up to a second when you had been running something much lower than that.”
He noted the predictability of mobile latency is a boon.
John Deere plans to deploy more 4G and 5G private networks across its 70 manufacturing sites, and 70 logistics and parts locations worldwide, as more spectrum becomes available.
TeckNexus has a video of conversation with Jason Wallin talking about "Private Network Journey of John Deere" which is embedded below:
I don't wish to throw cold water on Deere's desires but CBRS freq's only have a total of 150 MHz spectrum. The 1st 100 MHz block can be used by PAL channels but the remaining 50 MHz at the end of the spectrum must remain available for general use for all. Also PALs are NOT owned by anyone but are "licenses" granted to a specific user(s) per county in 10 MHz blocks. Only a total of 7 PALs can be granted per county(leaving 30 MHz left for unlicensed use) & only up to 4 PALs may be granted to any one specific user(that's only a total of up to 40 MHz potential interference free bandwidth). Here's the other rub, the SAS(the 3rd party "traffic cop" that assigns these sub-band channels to all users) may not always grant 40 MHz of consecutive bandwidth in the PALs that the licensee paid for. To really take advantage of 5G's low latency and heavy UE traffic capacity desired you really need more bandwidth than 40 MHz. Verizon's mid-band(C-band adjacent to CBRS) and high-band(mmW) in Illinois(for Moline comparison) are 160 MHz bandwidths each. There are too many US federal gov't rules provisioned for the CBRS and trying to use 5G in those freq's would give you an experience somewhere 4 times better than 5G low-band(without DSS) but 25% as good as 5G mid-band. You're also subject to mildly uncontrollable interference from other CBRS users which are definitely in-use around Moline, IL. Trying to use CBRS for 5G is a pipedream, it's not going to happen since that high end 50 MHz can be reserved for the gov't usage if necessary in an emergency especially near naval bases, but I think in Moline, that could be ruled out.
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