Development of a cloud-based automatic irrigation system: A case study on strawberry cultivation

Abstract

High increment rate of human population brings about the necessity of efficient utilization of world resources. One way of achieving this is providing the plants with the optimum amount of water at the right time in agricultural applications. In this paper, a cloud-based drip irrigation system, which determines the amount of irrigation water and performs the irrigation process automatically, is presented. Basically, water level in a Class A pan is continuously measured via a water level sensor and duration of irrigation is calculated using total amount of level decrement in a given time interval. The irrigation process is initialized by powering solenoid valves through a microcontroller board. To measure the environmental quantities such as temperature, humidity and pressure, an extra sensor is included in the system. A GSM/GPRS module enables internet connection of the system and all the sensor data as well as system status data are recorded in a cloud server. Furthermore, an accompanying Android application is developed to monitor the instantaneous status of the system. The system is tested on a strawberry field in a greenhouse. Currently, it is active for about four months and first observations imply that the system is capable of successfully perform the irrigation task.