New era of smart irrigation will embrace AI and machine learning alongside human expertise, says industry pioneer Calsense

That's the message from a newly unveiled roadmap from smart irrigation industry leader Calsense. The Calsense announcement provides a multi-phase vision for its irrigation technology over the coming years. The new initiative is designed to drive new levels of water and labor conservation to meet the needs of a changing climate and the weather effects that brings, as well as tackling ongoing challenges related to labor shortages.

"At Calsense, we have nearly 40 years of smart irrigation experience," said Calsense Senior Product Manager Josh Lehman. "This new vision for smart irrigation allies that unparalleled industry understanding with cutting edge technology to make the process of irrigation increasingly efficient and by extension, sustainable."

The Calsense roadmap outlines seven stages in the advancement of irrigation, from simple timers through to advanced predictive analytics that will enable remedying system issues before they become major problems.

As part of the roadmap, Calsense has identified an opportunity to harness the power of the latest innovations in natural language and generative AI to create intuitive experiences, which will help drive adoption of smarter technologies. These advancements will also help users solve problems faster and more efficiently using industry best practices.

"The key here is that the artificial intelligence itself is built on real-world human expertise and Calsense's decades of irrigation knowledge," Lehman said. "Further down the line, we'll introduce machine learning-based predictive analytics that will provide users with truly meaningful, actionable insights into the way their system is performing."

The seven phases that Calsense outlines in its roadmap also include today's conventional smart irrigation, which uses data such as weather, soil, topography and plant type to determine the optimum irrigation schedule, and 'as a service' pricing, as exemplified by Calsense's award-winning Irrigation Management as a Service™ (IMaaS™) offering. IMaaS allows customers to deploy full-scale smart irrigation systems while avoiding capital expenditure. Instead, they pay a fixed price for their system annually for 10 years.

The roadmap further includes IoT-first architecture, the implementation of human factors-based user experience interfaces, and the enablement of location-based asset management of irrigation and associated equipment.

"This vision is centered around the enhancement of the customer experience," Lehman explained. "That was the impetus for our newly launched Calsense Customer Innovation Council, and input from the Innovation Council sessions has been intrinsic to the development of this roadmap.

"It's been driven by our incredibly talented and diverse team at Calsense. We're rightfully renowned for our commitment to supporting our customers, and with this roadmap in place we're excited to journey alongside them into a more efficient and sustainable future."