Abstract
Farming automation requires a whole lot of new skills and use of technology for achieving a substantial increase in the crop yield. Smart farming enables the use of technology in tracking, monitoring, and analyzing various farming operations. Internet of things (IoT) platform is formed with sensors and actuators, cameras and drones, telecommunication technologies, edge devices, cloud servers, and specialized hardware and software. This chapter will discuss the available hardware and software technology elements that can be used in farm automation. The chapter is comprised of four sections. The first section provides an overview of precision agriculture and smart farming. The second section provides the literature review of existing research. The third section describes IoT techniques, sensors, and cloud and edge computing solutions for the implementation of smart farming. The fourth section provides a few case studies of the application of IoT in smart farming. Specifically, the chapter will describe the IoT platform solution for complete farm automation.
TopLiterature Review
The literature review presents research work conducted on Smart Farming in recent years. Araby et al. (2019) has proposed a smart IoT monitoring system. The system offers a predictive analysis. As mentioned in the paper, a wireless sensor network can be deployed that collects the data about certain crops. In this study the crops of potato and tomato have been utilized. The data obtained is provided to the machine learning algorithms which generate a warning message.
The use of machine learning algorithms in cultivation of potato crops can detect the signs of infection early so that appropriate measures can be applied to prevent further spread of the disease. This paper suggested a system to detect the occurrence of Late Blight disease in crops such as potato using regression analysis and gives appropriate advice to the farmer using a Graphical User Interface. The proposed system also has the advantage of reducing the unnecessary use of pesticides.
Jo et al. (2019) proposed an IoT enabled Compost Monitoring System. The system performs the monitoring of essential parameters of soil in real time. In this study an IoT based technique has been used to properly performing all processes of composting. The processor used in the system is Raspberry Pi and communication module is LoRa based. DHT11 sensor has been used to monitor temperature and relative humidity. The proposed approach will help the farmers to identify the most suitable time to turn the compost.
Abbasi et al. (2019) has presented a survey on the application of Internet of Things (IoT) on agriculture. This survey explored the IoT hardware platforms for agriculture like Arduino, Raspberry and Intel based models. The survey also explored various software platforms related to the agriculture. These software platforms are mostly cloud based platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Platform, Salesforce IoT platform, SAP IoT platform, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle IoT Platform IBM Watson IoT Platform and Microsoft Azure IoT hub. The IoT applications listed in the survey are environmental and ecological monitoring and irrigation. Several mobile apps on agriculture related tasks are also discussed. The challenges on the use of IoT in agriculture are identified as standardization of IoT devices, sensors and communication protocols, security and privacy and data storage and analysis on which more work is required.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Agriculture Robot: Is a robot mainly used for different agriculture related tasks such as plucking the fruits and vegetables, harvesting crops, planting seeds, climate monitoring, and soil monitoring.
Smart Farming: Is the use of technology in agriculture with the aim of increasing the crop yields. Basically, the focus of Smart Farming is on making informed decisions using information technology and data science.
Precision Agriculture: Is a technique of agriculture that aims to enable farmers to provide the crops those resources which they need precisely with great accuracy. The resources may be sunlight, water, fertilizers, or pesticides.
Smart Greenhouse: Is a breakthrough in farming technology that creates a microclimate for consistent plant growth with the help of sensor technology. It optimizes the plant growth by adjusting the growing conditions automatically.