Low-Cost Smart Irrigation System Based on Internet of Things and Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

The world's needs for water, energy and food are constantly increasing. This pattern which only seems to be growing creates global challenges which are critical for our survival as a species, mainly the need to provide enough food while conserving the limited water sources that are still available. Irrigation is one of the most resource hungry processes in this global chain, accentuated most by the use of traditional methods. New systems based on the technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are available to automate the irrigation process. In this paper we present a low-cost system that aims at reducing both human intervention and water consumption. This system acquires data about soil moisture, ambient temperature and humidity as well as rain presence parameters. MQTT protocol is used to transmit data between nodes and the Raspberry Pi device, data is then sent to ThingSpeak in order to be checked by the user in real time. The latter can then decide either to automate the irrigation scheduling based on sensed parameters, or to manually control the wireless solenoid valves through a mobile application. Fuzzy logic was implemented to assure proper functioning of the system at the operational stage, through defining the rules that govern the flow of the right quantities of water.