PRECISION AGRICULTURE
Where Technology Meets Agriculture
PROJECT MOTIVATION
Climate change and pollution adversely affect agriculture produce. Although measures are taken in terms of using fertilizers and monitoring soil quality, often the measurements are imprecise resulting in an excess of resource utilization. The project aims to make a low-power sensor network to monitor various climate parameters such as temperature, moisture, pH level using RFID tag clusters placed on tree leaves and branches. The project draws inspiration from interdisciplinary groups to understand the orchard environment - Spring Orchard Research and Education center in the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with Electrical and Computer Engineering plans to dive into smart agriculture and analyze the impact of technology in improving the orchard quality.
PRECISION AGRICULTURE GOALS
LOW POWER SYSTEM DESIGN
Battery-less sensor nodes
Since a sensor node cluster is to be deployed at various sites, it is important to ensure a reliable power source. Battery based systems incur maintenance costs and as such using battery-less sensors that can be energized using radio signals is the ideal solution to the problem.
SMALL FORM FACTOR
Compact and Easy to mount
To check the moisture, temperature , pH and other physiological parameters ,it is very important to keep the size as small as possible, in consideration of Orchard field, and placing them on leaves and branches of a plant. Thus, a thin, label-like form factor is perfect for this application
RFID READER
Obtaining the sampled data
The idea is to trigger tags to sample data when energized and store in flash memory. A strong RFID reader is essential to beam large amounts of power and read the entire flash contents from the sensor tags.
BLOCK DIAGRAM
The main part of this project is the board with cluster if tags which senses different parameters. These clusters are connected to a processing unit, which aims to send RF signals in short, fixed interval of time which energizes the sensor tags. The RF signal would triger the tags by energising them tok sample the data. The sampled data is stored in the flash memory of the tag. A more powerful RFID tag reader can be used to continously energize the tags so that all the data in flash can be read. The part to be focussed in the project is to make the board with the cluster of tags
The project aims to explore power consumption, sensor data and benchmarking range.
HARDWARE
Initial Boards
RFM405 XERXES WIRELESS PASSIVE SENSOR IC
The RFM405 Xerxes™ IC extends the Magnus® line of Smart Passive Sensing™ ICs (Integrated Circuits), enabling wireless passive sensors that are maintenance-free and battery-free. The original Magnus line of sensors monitored temperature, moisture, humidity, weight, and proximity. The new RFM405 Xerxes line adds secure communication as well as external sensor support for gas detection, thermocouples, and other traditional sensing components.
RFID KIT
The kit provides basic tags and readers to get started for the project. This shall be specified with exacxt hardware shortly.
APPLICATIONS
WIDE AREA NETWORKS
CLOUD STORAGE
ANALYTICS
TIMELINE
RESEARCH AND DESIGN
Suitable hardware and literature survey
(October Week 1)
TESTING HARDWARE
Checking and testing already existing hardware prototypes
(October Week 2 &3)
ROUGH PROTOTYPE
Building Rough schematic and changes in the hardware according to the aim
(October end)
BUILDING BOARD AND ALTERNATIVES
Putting the schematic together
(November Week 1,2 & 3)
TESTING AND DEBUGGING
Checking for bugs and testing
(November-December Week 1)
REPORT AND PRESENTATION
Displaying the final Demo and the Report submission
(December 20)
REFERENCES
[1] Vasisht, Deepak, Zerina Kapetanovic, Jongho Won, Xinxin Jin, Ranveer Chandra, Sudipta Sinha, Ashish Kapoor, Madhusudhan Sudarshan, and Sean Stratman. "Farmbeats: An iot platform for data-driven agriculture." In 14th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation ({NSDI} 17), pp. 515-529. 2017.
[2] Iyer, Vikram, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Anran Wang, Sawyer B. Fuller, and Shyamnath Gollakota. "Living IoT: A Flying Wireless Platform on Live Insects." In The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, pp. 1-15. ACM, 2019.
[3]Wang, Anran, Vikram Iyer, Vamsi Talla, Joshua R. Smith, and Shyamnath Gollakota. "{FM} Backscatter: Enabling Connected Cities and Smart Fabrics." In 14th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation ({NSDI} 17), pp. 243-258. 2017.
