IoT based solar powered Agribot for irrigation and farm monitoring: Agribot for irrigation and farm monitoring

Abstract

Agriculture contributes to a major portion of India's GDP. Two major issues in modern agriculture are water scarcity and high labor costs. These issues can be resolved using agriculture task automation, which encourages precision agriculture. Considering abundance of sunlight in India, this paper discusses the design and development of an IoT based solar powered Agribot that automates irrigation task and enables remote farm monitoring. The Agribot is developed using an Arduino microcontroller. It harvests solar power when not performing irrigation. While executing the task of irrigation, it moves along a pre-determined path of a given farm, and senses soil moisture content and temperature at regular points. At each sensing point, data acquired from multiple sensors is processed locally to decide the necessity of irrigation and accordingly farm is watered. Further, Agribot acts as an IoT device and transmits the data collected from multiple sensors to a remote server using Wi-Fi link. At the remote server, raw data is processed using signal processing operations such as filtering, compression and prediction. Accordingly, the analyzed data statistics are displayed using an interactive interface, as per user request.