Recipient Organization
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
775 WIDSTOE BUILDING
PROVO,UT 84602
Performing Department
Electrical and Computer Engine
Non Technical Summary
Farmers have methods to apply water at the scale of a few feet but do not have the required information to know where and how much water to apply at that scale. If farmers knew which areas of a field needed more or less water, they could grow the same amount of produce with less water, bringing economic benefits to the farmer.The goal of this project is to design and deploy many inexpensive Bluetooth devices in a field that can send soil wetness data to a few receivers in the field. Maps generated daily from the wetness information will indicate where and how much water to apply. Farmers can use the maps to program irrigation devices to apply water where and when it is needed. By using this information, farmers will reap economic benefits and be able to respond better to changing weather patterns, productivity will increase, and limited water resources will be more efficiently used by communities.
Animal Health Component
70%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
70%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
Our research team aims to develop a reliable system for high density, low-cost, wireless soil sensing to support irrigation within precision agriculture. The goal of this three-year project is to decrease wasted water and increase crop productivity and water use efficiency through using inexpensive Bluetooth devices to map soil wetness so farmers know where to apply more and less water.The main objectives of this project are:A. Deployment of a low-cost, high density, soil sensing system that uses Bluetooth transmitters paired with high-gain, rotating receivers to collect data over km-scale fields wirelessly. Sub-objectives include:Design and mass production of an improved, low-power Smart Stake with capacitance sensing to estimate soil wetness, Bluetooth low-power transmission capability, and solar power generation and storage.Design of a Bluetooth advertisement protocol to transmit current and past measurements to receivers.Design of a rotating, high-gain receiver that can receive long-distance Bluetooth transmissions from Smart Stakes and upload data collected to cloud-based storage.Design of cloud-based storage and client retrieval of Bluetooth transmission data from multiple stakes.Quantification of energy balance of devices in the field environment to estimate energy storage constraints and communication limitations.Quantification of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) signals from low-profile Smart Stakes in the field environment to estimate communication reliability over long range.Quantification of accuracy of Angle-of-Arrival localization of Smart Stakes in the field environment.Quantification of signal attenuation parameters through crop canopy during growing season.Implementation of attenuation-based crop canopy parameter estimation using inverse modeling of signal paths through the canopy.B. Quantifying distribution and accuracy requirements for decision-making under real and simulated sensor coverage constraints. Sub-objectives include:Simulation of historical maps for Idaho field site to create theoretical reference map conditions of high sensor density and accuracy.Sub-sampling of historical maps to assess error and trade-offs between sensor density, accuracy, placement on creation of spatial maps of soil water content or soil wetness.Evaluation of effects of water content, soil texture, salinity, and organic matter levels on capacitance measured from the Smart Stake sensors to create simplified scales of soil wetness for major soil textural classes.Automated processing of Smart Stake data into soil wetness maps and wetness histories.Automated processing of soil wetness maps to create temporally varying irrigation zone water application maps.Incorporation of daily sensor readings into models to produce daily dynamic management zones and Variable Rate Irrigation prescriptions.Manual sampling of soil to determine volumetric water content within fields and at greater depths for model accuracy comparison.Qualitative and quantitative feedback on the effectiveness of the Bluetooth Smart Stakes management system for commercial operations obtained from representative stakeholders.
Project Methods
Both formal and informal methods will be used to evaluate the success of the project and to enable the results to be disseminated outside of the academic community. Key to this is the establishment of an advisory board that will meet first in the fall of 2024 and then annually thereafter to both advise and evaluate the progress of this project. Additionally, given the starting date of the project, there will be two full growing seasons in 2025 and 2026 that will be used as key milestones - full systems need to be deployed in these years to generate meaningful data to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach and developed algorithms.The methods used in this project will be general electrical and computer engineering processes to design, build, test, manufacture, and deploy hundreds of devices to test the scalability of many Bluetooth transmitters in a field. Measurements of received signal strength, probability of receiving packets of data, power consumption, signal attenuation through the crop canopy, and overall manufacturing cost will be critical to the evaluation of the success of the deployed designs.In addition to quantitative measures of the Smart Stakes and receivers, qualitative feedback from farm operators and from the advisory board will be critical to evaluate the success of the newly created measurement system.Success of the algorithms will be primarily measured by a reduction of total water usage prescriptions in the commercial fields in which the sensors are deployed. As water irrigation is a complex, farmer-directed decision, comparison will be made between expected decisions and actual decisions. Fields in which variable-rate irrigation is not employed will also be compared with fields where the Smart Stakes are deployed.Quantitatively, simulations of the use of feedback-driven variable-rate irrigation will be used against normal irrigation scenarios. Qualitatively, feedback from the advisory board and commercial farmers on the use of the prescriptions will permit evaluation of the effectiveness of the methods. The two full growing seasons during the project will allow for year-over-year comparisons as the system becomes more sophisticated and robust.