Cloud Based Real Time Soil Moisture Content Monitoring Using IoT and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used for agriculture have recently emerged as a key tool for ground sensing in "smart farming." For precision agriculture's water management and monitoring and control systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used as a mobile hotspot in areas without a dependable internet connection. In such places, the agricultural UAV equipped with a suite of Internet of Things sensors would be rendered ineffective. Currently, IoT sensors collect data on the soil's temperature and moisture and transmit that information to farmers through cloud storage and mobile apps rather than UAVs. In this proposed work, we have combined and connected UAVs and IoT network-based sensors. We have proposed a system to collect and measure the soil moisture contents remotely in real-time through a drone. For a country like India whose main source of revenue is agriculture, this domain is not sufficiently explored in terms of technology. The lack of sufficient research in this domain has been a problem for the livelihood of those farmers whose sole existence depends on agriculture. An economical process could be devised that could help automate the process of knowing the exact soil moisture content of the entire farmland. Farmers would benefit greatly from such a process. In this proposed work, we monitor real-time soil moisture by collecting the data using the soil moisture sensor and an Arduino UNO. The transmitted data is transmitted to the drone, which further sends the resultant data for real-time monitoring and analysis to the cloud.