An Automated Irrigation System for Smart Agriculture Using the Internet of Things

Water is a vital and scarce resource in agriculture and its optimal management is emerging as a key challenge. This paper presents an automated irrigation system to reduce water utilization in agriculture by combining the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and optimization tools. The automated irrigation system deploys low cost sensors to sense variables of interest such as soil moisture, pH, soil type, and weather conditions. The data is stored in Thingspeak cloud service for monitoring and data-storage. The field data is transmitted to the cloud using Wi-Fi modem and using GSM cellular networks. Then an optimization model is used to compute the optimal irrigation rate which are automated using a solenoid valve controlled using an ARM controller (WEMOS D1). The variables of interest are stored in the cloud and offered as a service to the farmers. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a pilot scale agricultural facility and our results demonstrate the reduction in water utilization, increase in data-availability, and visualization.