Ceres Operating System

Ceres is a operating system for internet-connected farming equipment. Ceres is purpose-built to address the delivery of AI (Artificial Intelligence) enabled precision farming at a massive scale. It allows the central administration, provisioning & analysis of equipment in the farms. At scale, equipment powered by Ceres can be connected over a geographically distributed network using wired, wireless or mobile networks. This allows Ceres to span an entire country thus covering several million hectares of arable land.

Although Ceres will in future address most activities in the farm that can be automated, today it is employed in irrigation solutions to address acute water scarcity in farms. Water conservation is the primary focus of the current version of Ceres. The capabilities of Ceres allows us to:

• Augment existing drip irrigation infrastructure with intelligence deployed either on the cloud or in the farm
• Manage the intelligence seamlessly whether deployed on the cloud or in the field
• Facilitate rapid reconfiguration and upgrade of farming equipment on a national scale using existing mobile networks (2G-4G).
• Dramatically reduce cost of precision farming deployment & maintenance by leveraging wireless interconnects, 4G networks & enhanced capabilities of modern low-cost embedded devices
• Allow a heterogeneous set of sensors & switches, from disparate vendors to interoperate over a single national network
• Facilitate acquisition of large amounts of real-time sensor measurements to further agricultural research
• Allow big-data, machine learning and AI to power agriculture, transforming agriculture into a data science

Design Concept

Ceres IoT: In-Farm Automation (Bloom)

Boom is a suite of in-farm automation solutions powered by the open-source Ceres IoT operating system that controls any equipment or sensor employed in food production. This may include pumps, valves, sensors, drones or autonomous robots. Orchestrated and managed a cloud infrastructure called the 'Agricultural Internet', these solutions allow farmers full control over their infrastructure from anywhere, using a mobile phone.

Ceres Cortex: Cloud Orchestration

Ceres Cortex is a cloud operating system that runs and orchestrates all agricultural activities across a country on behalf of a farmer. It is a centralized repository of digital assets including crop models, climate information, industrial business-intelligence & real-time farm data telemetry. Every day, the operating system ingests an immense stream of data flowing from the farm and the internet constantly looking holistically for ways to optimize farms operations in real-time, based on changes in the farm environment, industry & ecosystem. Such an infrastructure constitutes a platform for an National Farming Infrastructure (NFI); a platform that not just enables farm automation, but also optimal allocation of resources for ecological conservation, agricultural research.

Platforms

The Ceres operating system is available in two versions:

Ceres IoT : is the embedded version of the operating system, designed to be deployed in IoT devices deployed in the farm

Ceres Cortex: is the cloud computing infrastructure that creates an Agricultural Internet, where IoT devices can communicate with each other and can be administered from one central location on the Internet.