The smart irrigation controller is a controller that reduces water use by monitoring and utilizing site environmental information and applying the right amount of water. These controllers receive feedback from the irrigated system and adjust irrigation duration and/or frequency accordingly. There are generally two types of smart controllers: climatologically based and soil moisture-based. Climatologically based controllers are also known as evapotranspiration or ET-controller. Evapotranspiration is the process of transpiration by plants combined with evaporation that occurs from plant and soil surfaces. In order to take the advantages of both type of controllers, the objective of this study is to present the development of hybrid soil moisture sensor and climatologically based controller. As part of the development of complete smart irrigation controller, real-time hourly step evapotranspiration monitoring is required on the continuous way of control. For that reason, the objective of this study was to develop a real-time evapotranspiration monitoring in the application of smart cloud-based irrigation controller.The developed real-time evapotranspiration monitoring could estimate the hourly step reference evapotranspiration (ETo) from the environmental data. The real-time computation performed in an executable function that triggered every 10 min. by implementing time shifting. Investigation on the relation between soil moisture and ETo as a potential input of hybrid controller for the smart irrigation controller is in our future works.
Poster presentation at The Kyushu Branch Japanese Society of Agricultural Machinery and Food Engineers Conference 2015
Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan.
Extended Abstract