IPASJ International Journal of Electrical Engineering (IIJEE)
Web Site: [Link]
A Publisher for Research Motivation ........ Email:editoriijee@[Link]
Volume 5, Issue 12, December 2017 ISSN 2321-600X
FUTURE OF THE DRIP IRRIGATION
SYSTEM: A PROPOSED APPROACH
Bean, Roy
Carnegie Mellon University
ABSTRACT
Rain has never been a reliable source of water for agriculture. Drip irrigation allows water to drip slowly to the roots of plants,
through a network of valves, pipes, and emitters. The major challenge in front of researchers is to make drip irrigation system
completely automatic and free from manual intervention. This paper presents a smart drip irrigation system that uses a low
cost temperature and soil moisture sensors to manage and control water supply in water deficient areas. Data acquired from a
sensor node is sent through ADC Controller to a centralized cloud server that controls water supply. Moreover, the proposed
system has the ability to check the availability of necessary resources like water tank, pesticides storage tank etc. and based on
that, it takes decisions. Use of this system will result in overall cost effective, scalable and robust implementation of drip
irrigation.
1. INTRODUCTION
Agriculture plays a vital role in the development of country’s economy. In India, Agriculture is the largest livelihood
provider as the economy is mainly based on it and the climatic conditions are isotropic, still people are not able to make
full use of available agricultural resources. The main reason is the lack of rain water and shortage of land reservoir
water to agriculture fields. The continuous extraction of water from earth is reducing the groundwater level due to
which lot of land is coming slowly in the zones of un-irrigated land. Another very important reason of this is due to
unplanned use of water due to which a significant amount of water goes waste. At the present era, the Agriculture
sector heavily relies on human interaction with the physical space and entity. The farmers in India have been irrigating
the land at the regular intervals manually. The efficiency of an irrigation management system is highly dependent on
irrigation methods and schedules utilized such as surface irrigation or drip irrigation. Drip irrigation is an artificial
method of supplying water to the roots of the plant. This system is at times called trickle irrigation system and includes
trickling water onto the soil at low rates (2-20 liters/hour) from an arrangement of small measurement plastic funnels
fitted with outlets called emitters or drippers. Drip Irrigation prevents soil erosion, saves water and fertilizer can also
supplied by it. The high efficiency of drip irrigation results from two primary factors. The first is that the water soaks
into the soil before it can evaporate or run off. The second is that the water is applied near plants so that only part of the
soil in which the roots develop is wetted, not at all like surface and sprinkler irrigation, which includes wetting the
entire soil profile. With drip irrigation system water, applications are more frequent (generally every 1-3 days) than
with different techniques and this gives great high dampness level in the soil in which plants can flourish. While drip
systems are simple and pretty forgiving of errors in design and installation, there are some guidelines that if followed,
will make for a much better drip system. To handle drip system, always there is need of human intervention. If the
respective person is unavailable to switching the system ON or OFF, it may leads to starvation or overwatered plants.
To deal with such type of problems, there is need of making the entire system automatic. The system should be capable
enough to identify the situation and based on apply some intelligent decisions. This paper mainly focuses on achieving
the above mentioned goal. The remaining paper is organised as follows: Section 2 discusses the literature survey done
in existing domain. The proposed system is explained in section 3 and modes of operation in section 4. Finally benefits
of system in section 5 and concluding remarks are discussed in section 6.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
With water becoming a scarce resource, Drip Irrigation is the answer to modern agricultural needs. Baltej Kaur, Danish
Inamdar in their proposed system [1], used an android mobile application to remotely control the drip irrigation system.
The different sensors like humidity, temperature, soil are deployed in the field to monitor the environmental conditions.
The information based on environmental conditions is transferred to android app via base station. User features such as
spatial views, custom charts, real-time data access, remote access, irrigation control, alerts, and plant models help to
create a smart irrigation system that is usercentric. The smart drip irrigation system proves to be a useful system as it
Volume 5, Issue 12, December 2017 Page 1
IPASJ International Journal of Electrical Engineering (IIJEE)
Web Site: [Link]
A Publisher for Research Motivation ........ Email:editoriijee@[Link]
Volume 5, Issue 12, December 2017 ISSN 2321-600X
automates and regulates the watering without any manual intervention. Nikhil Agrawal and Smita Singhal[2]
developed an automation system devices including raspberry pi, arduino microcontrollers, xbee modules and relay
boards. Similarly, Angel C and Asha S [3] focused on the reduction of energy consumption by the sensors during
communication. In their research they used sensors like Soil ph Sensor, Moisture Sensor and Humidity Sensor etc.
Based on the sensed data, their system will automatically decide about the necessary action for irrigation and also
notifies the user.
The authors of paper [4] present a mobile application that is android based, to control drip irrigation system. In this a
mobile sends command to PC to control drip irrigation. Here also they used different sensors like humidity,
temperature, light etc. for detection purpose. These sensors send real time values to microcontroller and microcontroller
send these values to PC via serial communication. According to sensor values graph will be display on PC and Mobile
side and by using this graph user can on or off drip devices. Similar type of approach is used by Karan Kansara1,
Vishal Zaveri1[5] in their research aiming to save time, money & power of the farmer. The traditional farm-land
irrigation techniques require manual intervention. With the automated technology of irrigation the human intervention
can be minimized. Whenever there is a change in temperature and humidity of the surroundings these sensors senses
the change in temperature and humidity and gives an interrupt signal to the micro-controller. The drip can be then
controlled automatically as well as manually.
3. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The aim is to design computer driven automated drip irrigation system. The system model uses sensor technology with
microcontroller to make a smart switching device. An ADC connected to microcontroller gather the humidity values for
soil at various points. Below figure shows the complete system architecture. In this proposed system various sensors are
required which includes humidity, temperature etc. for capturing the data. These sensors send the real time values to
micro-controller and these values send to Cloud based server by microcontroller via serial communication. According
to the sensor values, logs are maintained at the server side. On server side an algorithm is applied which sets the
threshold value for physical entities that are to be measured by sensors and checks the collected logs against these
preset thresholds. In this system, threshold value is maintained for every sensor. The drip irrigation technique can be
control by mobile from anywhere and also can change threshold values of sensors via mobile.
The proposed system architecture contains following components:
1. Sensors: (Light, Temperature, level): Sensor Sense the different physical parameters like light, PH value of soil,
temperature and converts these sense data into electrical signals.
2. ADC: (Analog to Digital Converter) It Converts analog signal into digital signal and give that digital signal to the
micro controller as an input.
3. Micro-controller: It is heart of the entire system, which means it controls all the activities of the system. It has
memory in which control programs are saved.
4. Server: (Cloud Server) It collects the sensors data. All the algorithms and logics are applied on that data and
appropriate predictions and decisions are made. These servers are also connected with users for confirmation of those
decisions.
5. Mobile: (Client) The android mobile is act as client which gets all the data captured by sensors and some graphical
or pictorial representation of that data. The user then can take decisions like switch ON or OFF the drip devices etc.
4. MODES OF THE OPERATION
1. Manual Control
In this mode the system can be manually make ON or OFF depending on the user need.
2. Automatic Control
All the available sensors periodically send data to the centralized server. Based on threshold values set for the
temperature, humidity and water resources, appropriate decision is taken by the cloud server. This decision is then
responsible for making Drip system ON or OFF.
3. Naïve Bayes Control
All the sensor data is captured and stored at server’s database. This data is used to train the Naïve Bayes Prediction
Algorithm. After training, system becomes capable of differentiating the sensor data into three categories mainly low,
medium and high. These rules will be responsible for future predictions regarding making system ON or OFF.
Volume 5, Issue 12, December 2017 Page 2
IPASJ International Journal of Electrical Engineering (IIJEE)
Web Site: [Link]
A Publisher for Research Motivation ........ Email:editoriijee@[Link]
Volume 5, Issue 12, December 2017 ISSN 2321-600X
5. BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM
Human intervention with system is avoided and provides an automated dripirrigation system. The system also has an
ability to reschedule activity after a specific time slot.
Authorization is done so that only valid person can operate on this system.
Save water, energy and manpower in the agriculture sector.
Efficient and effort reducing system design.
Increases the crop production and it uses the different sensors like temperature, light, humidity, soil moisture so it
can be used in area where water resources are less.
6. CONCLUSION & FUTURE SCOPE
In this study, a drip irrigation automation system is proposed which tries to tackle problems related to traditional
irrigation systems. The temperature and humidity sensors capture the data and send it to centralized cloud server where
it gets processed. Moreover, farmers get all the information about their farm and also can interact with drip from their
mobile devices. The developed system can also transfer fertilizer and the other agricultural chemicals (calcium, sodium,
ammonium, zinc) to the field with adding new sensors and valves. The smart drip system can be used in commercial as
well as agricultural use.
REFERENCES
[1] Baltej Kaur , Danish Inamdar, Vishal Raut, Akash Patil, Nayan Patil, “ A survey on smart drip irrigation system”,
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[2] Agrawal, Nikhil, and Smita Singhal, “Smart drip irrigation system using raspberry pi and arduino”, Computing,
Communication & Automation (ICCCA), 2015 International Conference on, IEEE, 2015.
[3] Angel C and Asha S, “A study on developing a smart environment in agricultural irrigation technique”,
International Journal of Ambient Systems and Applications (IJASA) Vol.3, No.2/3, September 2015,
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[4] Pragati Tate,Nazmeen Tamboli, Abhilasha Lokhande, Prof. Gayatri Bhandar, “A Mobile Application to Control
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[5] Karan Kansara1, Vishal Zaveri1, Shreyans Shah, Sandip Delwadkar, Kaushal Jani , “Sensor based Automated
Irrigation System with IOT: A Technical Review”, International Journal of Computer Science and Information
Technologies (IJCSIT), Vol. 6 (6), 2015, ISSN: 0975-9646.
[6] Kumar, Akash, et al., “Smart irrigation using low-cost moisture sensors and XBee-based communication”, Global
Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC),IEEE 2014.
[7] Mahir Dursun and Semih Ozden, “A wireless application of drip irrigation automation supported by soil moisture
sensors”, Scientific Research and Essays Vol. 6(7), pp. 1573-1582, 4 April, 2011, DOI: 10.5897/SRE10.949.
[8] Nemali, Krishna S., and Marc W. van Iersel, “An automated system for controlling drought stress and irrigation in
potted plants”, Scientia Horticulturae 110,July (2006): 292-297, doi:10.1016/[Link].2006.07.009.
[9] Gutiérrez, Joaquín, et al, “Automated irrigation system using a wireless sensor network and GPRS module”, IEEE
transactions on instrumentation and measurement 63,1 (2014): 166-176.
[10] Bastiaanssen, W. G. M., and M. G. Bos, “Irrigation performance indicators based on remotely sensed data: a
review of literature”, Irrigation and drainage systems 13,4 (1999): 291-311.
[11] Kia, P. Javadi, et al., “Intelligent control based fuzzy logic for automation of greenhouse irrigation system and
evaluation in relation to conventional systems”, World Applied Sciences Journal 6,1 (2009): 16-23.
[12] Singh, Sukhjit, and Neha Sharma, “Research paper on drip irrigation management using wireless sensors”,
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[13] Danish Inamdar, Akash Patil, Vishal Raut, Nayan Patil, B.K Saluja, “Automated Drip Irrigation System based on
Embedded System and GSM Network”, International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and
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