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Agricultural irrigation is a significant contributor to freshwater consumption. However, the current irrigation systems used in the field are not efficient. They rely mainly on soil moisture sensors and the experience of growers but do not account for future soil moisture loss. Predicting soil moisture loss is challenging because it is influenced by numerous factors, including soil texture, weather conditions, and plant characteristics. This article proposes a solution to improve irrigation efficiency, which is calledDRLIC(deep reinforcement learning for irrigation control).DRLICis a sophisticated irrigation system that uses deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize its performance. The system employs a neural network, known as the DRL control agent, which learns an optimal control policy that considers both the current soil moisture measurement and the future soil moisture loss. We introduce an irrigation reward function that enables our control agent to learn from previous experiences. However, there may be instances in which the output of our DRL control agent is unsafe, such as irrigating too much or too little. To avoid damaging the health of the plants, we implement a safety mechanism that employs a soil moisture predictor to estimate the performance of each action. If the predicted outcome is deemed unsafe, we perform a relatively conservative action instead. To demonstrate the real-world application of our approach, we develop an irrigation system that comprises sprinklers, sensing and control nodes, and a wireless network. We evaluate the performance ofDRLICby deploying it in a testbed consisting of six almond trees. During a 15-day in-field experiment, we compare the water consumption ofDRLICwith a widely used irrigation scheme. Our results indicate thatDRLICoutperforms the traditional irrigation method by achieving water savings of up to 9.52%.
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Data Acquisition and Analysis for Improving the Utility of Low Cost Soil Moisture Sensors
To cultivate healthy plants and high crop yields, growers must be able to measure soil moisture and irrigate accordingly. Errors in soil moisture measurements can lead to irrigation mismanagement with costly consequences. In this paper, we present a new approach to smart computing for irrigation management to address these challenges at a lower cost. We calibrate low cost, low precision soil moisture sensors to more accurately distinguish wet from dry soils using high cost, high precision Davis Instrument sensors. We investigate different modeling techniques including the natural log of the odds ratio (Log-odds), Monte Carlo simulation, and linear regression to distinguish between wet and moist soils and to establish a trustworthy threshold between these two moisture states. We have also developed a new smartphone application that simplifies the process of data collection and implements our analysis approach. The application is extensible by others and provides growers with low cost, data-driven decision support for irrigation. We implement our approach for UCSB’s Edible Campus student farm and empirically evaluate it using multiple test beds. Our results show an accuracy rate of 91% and lowers costs by 4x per deployment, making it useful for gardeners and farmers alike.
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- PAR ID:
- 10451778
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 367 to 372
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/SMARTCOMP58114.2023.00087
