By Ben Allen – CEO, BinSentry
BinSentry works every day to help our customers run their businesses better and drive down animal feed costs – the single biggest expense for swine and poultry producers.
Since the beginning, our business strategy has been focused on helping our customers solve one key problem: Accurately and efficiently monitoring feed inventories by automating inefficient and dangerous manual processes with best-in-class sensors, AI and machine learning technologies.
Today, informed by countless discussions and interactions with mill owners, swine and poultry producers and integrators, BinSentry’s technology solutions are the best on the market.
Doing all that up-front work to see what’s inside the bin has paid dividends in other areas.
Solving supply chain pain points with BinSentry AI
By solving one core issue, the BinSentry platform addresses other pain points all along the supply chain: reducing feed outages, improving workplace safety, reducing waste and enhancing trucking efficiency, ensuring accurate ordering and demand forecasting, and more.
The BinSentry platform is monitoring over 45,000 feed bins for industry leaders including HANOR, Wayne Sanderson Farms, Aviagen, Cargill and Maple Leaf Foods. And we’re adding thousands of installations every month.
It’s been quite a journey, and we’ve solved some daunting technical challenges along the way.
Here’s how we tackled a few of them:
- Build a reliable AI model
Before BinSentry’s AI model could accurately provide real-time readings of feed bin volumes, our software developers and engineers had to review tens of thousands of images manually. This painstaking validation process was essential to train and build a dependable AI model that performs reliably in real-world conditions. It might seem like a strange thing to brag about, but it’s fair to say nobody has seen the inside of more bins than BinSentry .
- Design a rugged sensor
Feed bins and grain silos are exposed to extreme weather conditions on the outside, and they’re dark and dusty on the inside. Sensors must be able to withstand the toughest conditions in order to “see” inside the bins and provide an accurate picture of their contents. BinSentry’s 3D optical sensors install in 15 minutes, use solar power, are self-cleaning, and connect to the cloud via cellular networks.
- Provide different products for different environments
The typical dual feed bins located beside poultry and hog barns are a lot smaller and less dusty than the giant silos at commercial feed operations. So BinSentry provides two sensor products to suit the unique challenges of each environment.
Near-infrared (NIR) time-of-flight sensor technology uses light pulses to collect image and distance data inside the bins; the data is sent to the cloud and processed by AI to create 3D images of feed levels. The technology is lightning fast, taking thousands of data points every few seconds; it takes about a half million measurements to create a single bin volume reading.
- Ensure connectivity in rural settings
Providing all this amazing technology would be pointless if we couldn’t ensure reliable connectivity between our on-site sensors, producers and remote operators spread out in rural areas across North America, often far from broadband connections and cellular towers.
In the early days, we experimented with a number of network technologies, including LoRaWAN (low-power, wide-area network) and NB-IoT (NarrowBand-Internet of Things), before choosing LTE-M (Long-Term Evolution for Machines). It uses the same widespread network as LTE-enabled phones, but LTE-M is optimized for Internet of Things (IoT) applications to provide power efficiency, wider coverage, and lower cost.
- Provide timely, actionable data
BinSentry’s sensor technology captures real-time, 3D images inside feed bins, eliminating the guesswork involved in manual inventory checks (climbing ladders to look inside or banging on bins with mallets).
Readings can be updated multiple times a day. This allows operators to know precisely what is in their bins and silos at any time, from anywhere, and to identify and resolve issues like feed outages by notifying staff on-site via text so they can take appropriate action.
For an in-depth discussion of these issues and more, the recent episode of SORACOM‘s “What to Expect When You’re Connecting” podcast featuring our very own BinSentry CTO Nathan Hoel.
