Cost-effective smart irrigation controller using automatic weather stations

Abstract

Water has become increasingly scarce and valuable resource due to the increasing population and misuse of the same. Agriculture is the largest sector using water with low-efficiency and low-cost. Traditional irrigation methodology uses a qualitative approach to schedule irrigation that does not measure actual environmental condition whereas the quantitative approach requires additional setup for climate measurement. Low cost innovative water-saving technology is the need of the hour. The presented work proposes the cost-effective smart irrigation controller using automatic weather stations(AWS). The proposed smart controller makes real-time irrigation decision by gathering climatic data from nearby AWS. AWS's data are available on an hourly basis from Indian meteorological department. The primary challenge in designing irrigation controller is to acquire real-time data, to validate and to reconstruct the missing data. These problems are addressed in the presented paper. Evapotranspiration computed from nearby AWS are comparable with evapotranspiration provided by Indian Agricultural Research Institute.