IoT solutions for sustainable growth
The advancement of technology and growth of the Internet Of Things has enabled us to build systems which are not only technically advanced, but also helpful for the growth of mankind. And we, at Algonics, are working as an industrial partner with a team of IIT Mandi scholars to build a smart irrigation system which will help the farmers to manage irrigation to their remote farms.
The Idea
LoRa devices and wireless radio frequency technology making it easy and affordable for irrigation management systems to transform agriculture systems across the globe. Climate change and dynamic weather conditions continue to present challenges in agriculture management. Until now, farmers did not have an effective way to measure soil moisture and live weather information other than to visually inspect crop fields and depending on some third party weather data provider. The primary objective of this system is to develop the ability to detect soil moisture & essential weather data automatically and make necessary irrigation changes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT to prevent crop loss and save electricity as well as water providing overall growth to the agriculture system.
The overall idea of this system can be understood from the image below:
The system contains three primary modules, which are explained in the next sections.
Data Acquisition
The main challenge in this kind of system is to acquire data from remote fields which has no internet connection and fluctuating electricity supply. To overcome this challenge, we have used the latest low-frequency and long-range LoRaWAN technology. The field, i.e. the farming land, is equipped with different sensors like Soil Sensors, Weather Stations etc. A custom made controller sends all of these sensor data to a remote LoRaWAN gateway. This gateway can be set up even 10-30 Kilometers away from the field area, depending on the nature and landscape of the area. This LoRaWAN Gateway then transfers the sensor data to our cloud server. LoRa technology also uses very low battery power as we only need one way communication (from the controller to the gateway) in this kind of system.
The data acquisition system is extremely robust and we can use the similar technology to any other use case where long range data acquisition is required. We can also integrate more sensors to our data acquisition system without much changing our core backend technology.
Remote Control
The fields are equipped with pump controllers along with soil sensors and weather stations. These controllers are responsible for starting and stopping the water supply to the crop fields. The controllers are equipped with flow sensors which can measure the amount of water pumped to the field. The pump controllers updated our cloud backend with the flow data along with the pump’s current status periodically, just like the soil sensor and weather station. The pump controllers use two way LoRa communication and can be controlled remotely by the cloud backend.
Data Processing and Data Logging
The live data stream of data sent by the LoRaWAN gateway to our cloud backend, is first logged into a cloud database, where it’s safely stored for data analysis and data export purpose. The data is then processed by an AI (Artificial Intelligent) algorithm which decides how much water is needed for the field and instructs the remote pump controllers to start the pumps if needed. The live stream is constantly fed to the AI algorithm and it monitors the progress of the through the flow sensor data. Once the required amount of water is supplied to the field, the pump controllers are stopped remotely.
The data acquisition module is also developed in a very robust way so that any kind of AI algorithm written in any framework and library can easily be integrated with the system. Data Logging is done in a No-SQL based distributed database to ensure the data redundancy and availability.
The below diagram explains how the system works in practical:
Use Cases and future Scopes
Though we have applied LoRa, IoT and AI solutions together to solve a specific problem, the application of this technology is vast and can be helpful for every sector. From warehouse tracking to home automation, LoRa combined with IoT can be applied to all the fields. Some possible use cases of the technology can be:
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