Smart Sensors for Smart Agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture is the primitive and crucial occupation for the people. Urbanization, which indirectly affected the lives of people in the agricultural sector by increasing level of environmental pollution, climate change, degradation of soil and water quality, increasing population, decreasing income from the farming industry, etc. come as a new challenge and makes mass migration of rural people to the cities. To overcome this problem, new technologies are emerging that play a pivotal role in developing smart agriculture based on IoT technology by using smart sensors. Smart agriculture helps improve crop yield, livestock tracking, soil moisture monitoring, remote water tank level monitoring, temperature, and humidity sensing, the security of farmland, monitoring the environmental conditions, and equipment tracking. This helps farmers protect and monitor their property remotely, etc. Internet of things (IoT)-based smart sensors is the new technique for the smart agriculture system. IoT-based smart agriculture system consists of various sensor nodes placed in different locations, internet service, smart remote devices, or computer systems with the internet that monitor the operation of sensor nodes, WiFi, a camera with a microcontroller, and different interfacing sensing nodes for service. Some of the examples of such sensors are temperature sensors for temperature sensing, soil moisture sensors to check the moisture content in the soil, PIR sensors used in the detection of animals, people and other objects present in the farm field, GPS-based remote control robots that perform spraying, weeding, security, moisture sensing, etc. This chapter will have the following sequence introduction of the agriculture sector with the problems it is facing now and a new technique to overcome the current issues, need of IoT in the agriculture sector, the link of IoT technique with wireless sensor network in full detail study of IoT-based system, IoT-based applications, benefits of IoT technique in the agriculture sector, and future scope.