Smart Irrigation

Water is becoming scarcer, yet our need for food is rising. According to the UN, 60% of water used for irrigation is wasted, and the frequency of droughts is rising rapidly. This inefficiency is mainly caused by manual or schedule-based irrigation. Could this problem be solved with emerging technologies, especially internet-of-things (IoT) and artificial-intelligence (AI)?

My project has five main components. First is a sensor node, which checks temperature, humidity, and soil-moisture in the plantation and sends data back to server via Wi-Fi or cellular-data (4G/5G). There is also a camera in the field that sends pictures of the plant back to server. The irrigation system is connected to internet via another node to allow it to be controlled smartly/remotely. The central server (hosted in the cloud) detects wilting, yellowing, and diseases in the image, then decides whether to water or not based on the image and sensor data plus rain forecasts. The users will interact with the system via a mobile app to see history/ data and manually override irrigation as backup.

To test the wilting detector, I download/took pictures of plants and categorized then as healthy or wilting. I ran the detector on each of these images, and it was overall 80% accurate. I tested the disease detector and yellowing detector in a similar way. Yellowing was 77% accurate, and disease was 93% accurate.

While current irrigation is labor-intensive and overwaters crops, this is a low-cost system that can increase efficiency and reduce water wastage using emerging technologies.