A Smart Precision-Agriculture Platform for Linear Irrigation Systems

A smart platform is presented that manages the components of an automatic precision irrigation system. The platform has a distributed architecture that includes a decision support system(Irriframe), a server node, a mobile application for user interaction, and embedded IoT devices that operate linear irrigation machines. The decision support system is queried by the server and it computes an irrigation map, i.e., the amount of water to be supplied in each cell of the field by integrating geographic, meteorological and soil data, as well as the vegetation map obtained from an aerial survey and the technical specifications of the irrigation machine. The mobile application is used by the farmer to register user data on the decision support system, to request an irrigation plan from the server and to control the irrigation process with real-time monitoring. Preliminary experiments were conducted in tomato fields to test the main components of the system.