Irrigation Automation using IoT

Abstract

Cultivation is an integral part of millions of people’s lives in an agrarian country like India. Employment in agriculture in India

was reported at 42.74 % in 2017 according to the World Bank estimate. Most of the irrigation is done using electric submersible pumps and traditional methods. The power cuts for irrigation is quite common in this land. Hence, farmers face many woes while working in their fields, especially during night hours, like electric shock, snake bites, extreme weather conditions. As many as 46,000 farmers die of snakebites in India alone every year, highest for any country in the world. Our current work finds cost-effective and an elegant prototype solution for smart irrigation anywhere, anytime basis, towards modernization of agriculture by using cloud computing based IoT scheme. A fully automated smart irrigation system is designed using Raspberry Pi platform and associated software and hardware from Xtrans Solutions. The remote unit is connected to moisture sensors, that uploads the sensed values to the cloud. Farmer can benefit from the unit through a smartphone with Android app. Irrigation happens in either of the two modes, viz. Manual mode and Remote Monitoring mode. In the former type, electric motor can be switched on/off via Android based RaspController App. In the latter case, the sensor determines the moisture level of the soil and turn motor on/off dynamically based on pre-set conditions. Python language is used for programming. In any of the cases, farmer is alerted through voice call, email and SMS about the status of the motor.