Challenge
Lely Industries has a variety of machines worldwide working at about 21,000 farms. The fleet consists of more than 100,000 robots for milking, feeding, and cleaning. The majority of robots work day and night.
Lely wanted to stay ahead of the competition and realized that they needed to provide additional products and services to their customers in addition to the robots. They quickly discovered that having data from the robots is the prerequisite for building applications for their customers.
But can they reliably collect data from all those robots? Since Lely has been in the business of automated dairy farming for a long time, the robots span multiple architectures, and the hardware has already gone through several generations. That makes the integration with any central system challenging.
Also, farms are usually located in rural areas where connectivity to the Internet is limited. Sudden connectivity drops, low bandwidth, and high packet loss make reliable data collection difficult. Lely requires that no data from robots is lost during periods of limited connectivity that can last even days. Moreover, the robots have a limited storage capacity, so they can buffer just a few messages before they run out of space.
Approach
It was clear from the beginning that data needed to be collected in some central storage, ideally data from all farms, so Lely has a high-level overview of all the robots.
Several off-the-shelf products were evaluated, but Lely did not find any that would fit and is also future-proof to deliver on their ambitions' long-term roadmap. Ultimately, they decided to go with the buy-and-build approach, buying the Spotflow IoT platform and customizing it according to their needs.
Solution
Work with Lely started with solution architecture workshops, which resulted in solid architecture blueprints and a roadmap.
The system comprises about 100,000 robots and 21,000 Spotflow IoT gateways (one gateway per site) operating on the farm's local network and the Spotflow IoT platform in the cloud.
Since the farms are primarily located in remote locations, Internet connectivity is not ideal and can be down for days. That resulted in a need to cache data locally and send it to the cloud once connectivity is restored. The Spotflow IoT gateway service was installed on the Lely server located on each farm, and Lely’s embedded engineering team changed the robot software and integrated it with the Spotflow IoT gateway. All robots within the farm send data to the gateway within the network by calling a simple API. The gateway is available 24/7 and ready to accept new data because it’s installed within the local network and is not dependent on Internet availability.
During our long-term cooperation with Lely, we implemented more improvements to the IoT gateway to support Lely’s unique setting. For example, Lely needed to prioritize delivering business-critical data over less critical ones, such as robots' logs. That is crucial when the bandwidth on the farm is low. We implemented the support for message stream priority into the gateway and made it fully configurable from the cloud, so there is no need to change settings on the robots.
All data coming to the Spotflow IoT platform is persisted in central object storage and is available for Lely personnel according to configured access policies. Some data is routed to storages, queues, and apps based on the platform configuration to make it available for existing and new solutions used by Lely internally and their customers.
Solution statistics
- 21,000 farms around the world.
- 100,000 connected robots (always-on connection via stateful MQTT).
- 70,000 messages ingested into the cloud per minute at peak times. 30,000 messages per minute on average.
Results
- The always up-to-date data within the central storage and the possibility of routing data to various storages allow Lely to build new applications for its customers and internal users. For example, Lely's partner, Datamole, implemented a Personalized milking routine for cows.
- New animal welfare metrics, such as milk quality, cow health, rumination, and feed efficiency, improved the existing apps, helping Lely’s customers better understand their herd.
- Unlocked cooperation with external vendors thanks to the possibility of securely granting them access to use case-specific data.
- Faster troubleshooting due to diagnostics data that are available in the cloud.
- Ability to change settings on the robots from the cloud via the simple web interface.
For us at Lely, the satisfaction of our customers is a key. Thanks to the implementation of the Spotflow IIoT platform, we gained the opportunity to offer our customers additional products and services. As an example, our customers can now individualize the care of their animals and monitor their health condition 24/7 from anywhere in the world.
We were able to introduce our paid subscription Horizon Farm management solution based on this IoT platform in >60 countries absorbing huge amounts of real-time IoT data of the machines and animals for over 90% of our customers worldwide in a scalable and reliable way. We continue to develop and scale all our Data applications build on top of this foundation.
Spotflow IIoT platform ensures that data is gathered from more than 30,000 machines in a near real-time manner. The data is securely sent to and stored on centralized cloud-based storage, which makes it immediately accessible to our teams working on various innovative projects. Our key requirement was to make this process fully autonomous and robust because we couldn’t keep supporting it manually, given the size of our fleet.
On top of data ingestion, we can remotely configure and monitor all machines using simple tools with the ultimate goal of making the process fully automated in the future, such that the need to visit them physically is dramatically reduced. For example, we can detect disruptions to our data processing pipelines and resolve issues when they occur, if not before.