Deutsche Telekom has deployed a Private 5G network across a wine vineyard in the Moselle Valley, Germany.

Located in the district of Cochem-Zell, the “Smarter Weinberg” project aims to preserve the 2,000-year-old vineyard through 5G-based digitization and automation.

The project is being funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport.

The Private 5G network uses industrial frequencies in the range of 3.7 to 3.8 gigahertz and will give researchers, winegrowers, and companies exclusive access to over 100 megahertz of bandwidth.

A robot equipped with a 5G router will automatically carry out tasks such as soil cultivation or defoliation (leaf-cutting). Vines across the site will be recorded with cameras integrated into the robot.

Cultivation equipment can also be controlled in real-time and information such as foliage volume and density can be collected from the recorded data.

A shortage of skilled workers and the risk of accidents on the site have caused problems for winegrowers in the region.

“Not much research has been done in the field of automation, especially for viticulture on steep slopes. The robotics platform that we developed in the project brings automation to the vineyard. But for the automation to work, we need a powerful computer and a powerful network. And for that, a private 5G campus solution is indispensable,” said Maria Wimmer, professor of E-government at the University of Koblenz.

The robots are operated “emission-free," according to the company, and an electric car capable of supplying electricity has been deployed.

The project is being coordinated by the University of Koblenz. Other partners are the Service Center for Rural Areas (Mosel), Agricultural Machinery Technology Clemens Technologies, Vision and Robotics, AeroDCS, as well as the winegrowers Franzen in Bremm and Weis in Zell/Mosel.

This is not the first time that robotics and Edge computing have been used for farming. Cow monitoring company SmaXtec developed a small processor for dairy cows to measure body health parameters and improve dairy yield.

Deutsche Telekom has also deployed a Private 5G network at a Volkswagen port terminal in Emden, Germany. The project is supporting a new autonomous car initiative at the site.