Abstract
Due to the increasingly growth in population, it is important to better use natural resources for food production and efficiency, driving the use of sensors each time more to monitor several aspects of the soil and of the crops in the field. However, it is known that the harsh conditions of the field environment demands more robust and energy efficient sensor devices. One example is soil water monitoring for irrigation: Brazil, for example, consumes 69% of its freshwater only for irrigation purposes, which shows the need of using adequate water moisture sensors. Based on that, this work proposes a modular architecture that integrates several sensor technologies, including battery-less sensors and low power sensors for soil moisture measurements, but not limited to them. The proposed system relies on a mobile robot that can locate each deployed sensor autonomously, collect its data and make it available on-line using cloud services. As proof of concept, a low-cost mobile robot is built using a centimeter level accuracy location system, that allows the robot to travel to each sensor and collect their data. The robot is equipped with an UHF antenna to provide power to RF powered battery-less sensors, a Bluetooth low energy data collector and a Zigbee data collector. An experimental evaluation compares reading distance and successful rate of sensor location and reading.
Highlights
Agriculture is a key activity for humankind support
For automated systems, such sensors may be on the field or on a robot, and remotely read by wireless sensor networks or by the robot itself that acts as a relay
With the proliferation of sensors, sensors networks and the Internet of Things, precision agriculture faces a reality of a large number of heterogeneous technologies and systems, such as Wifi, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy, RFID, among others [1]
Summary
Agriculture is a key activity for humankind support. In that way, each time more, technological solutions are being adopted to enhance the productivity and reliability of agriculture. One key element of these new approaches is called "precision agriculture", which relies on sensors to gather information about the crop and field conditions, allowing Engineers, operators or automated systems to make decisions of how to treat crops. For automated systems, such sensors may be on the field or on a robot, and remotely read by wireless sensor networks or by the robot itself that acts as a relay. These technologies are already mature and becoming each time more used These machines usually operate by pre-programmed routes and waypoints, and do not usually collect data from the field. One example is the work of Handcock et al [3], which uses wireless sensor networks to monitor animal behavior
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