Development of an autonomous mobile plant irrigation robot for semi structured environment

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this research is to develop an autonomous mobile plant irrigation robot. The system uses an Xbee Series 1wireless communication to communicate between the mobile robot and a moisture sensing module which is fully adaptive to a semi-structured environment taking into account the watering needs of the plants. Other components are microcontroller, an on-board water reservoir and an attached water pump. The performance evaluation of the autonomous irrigation robot was based on the analysis of the water carrying capacity, distance of watering per cycle, and time requirements to water a given area of land. It shows that 5 litres of water can be maintained for 150 seconds by the robot. The soil moisture data at different times of the day deduced that the moisture content during the day was lower than after irrigation was carried out. The efficiency of the irrigation robot was also examined by the relationship between volume of water carried and the speed of the mobile robot. It shows that 0.38 N torque would permit the movement of the robot by 1 m at a water carrying capacity of less or equal to 3. 5 litres. The autonomous plant irrigation robot system constructed based on ZigBee overcomes the limitations of the fixed sprinkler system and avoids large space consumption.