Automated Agricultural Management Systems Using Smart Based Technology

Abstract

This research focuses on the design and implementation of an Internet of Things (IoT) smart-based system for the agriculture industry, especially chilli plantations. Every year, chilli farmers experience huge losses due to pest infestation and a lack of technology to precisely manage their farms. To solve several problems, the IoT system was designed to continuously monitor pest detection status, temperature, humidity index, and soil moisture level simultaneously. Besides these, the IoT system is also designed for long-distance remote water, pesticide, and fertiliser pumps. An IoT platform was applied in this project to provide a monitoring dashboard and switches to empower several pumps with long-distance remotes using the LoRa communication systems in a wide coverage range of chilli farms. Three experiments were designed to determine the range of the LoRa network. All experiments and data collection were done on the campus of Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) and the Melaka area. All experiments were analysed based on the results collected, such as packet reception rate (PRR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and received signal strength indicator (RSSI). Based on the experiment results and conclusion, the LoRa communication system is suitable for applying to chilli farms in order to monitor all the elements such as soil moisture and pest detection status. The experiment also concludes that this LoRa network can be worked effectively up to cover a range of 260m with the elevation of the gateway. Keywords—Management systems; Internet of Things; crop field; LoRa; agriculture industries; precision engineering