Design of Automated Irrigation System based on Field Sensing and Forecasting

The conventional irrigation systems tend to waste irrigation water by not considering the upcoming precipitation. The precipitation in India being erratic in nature calls for the use of efficient forecasting methods. This paper proposes a design of irrigation system that employs a weather forecasting algorithm to calculate the water requirement and control irrigation based on soil moisture for the sustainable irrigation of crops. Statistical forecasting methods are most suitable for this application as they can predict extreme weather conditions that could have occurred previously and needs negligible time to deploy the algorithm. Here a modified version of the sliding window algorithm has been used to fit the requirements of the irrigation system [4]. However, the design can work with other forecasting methods due to implementation of modularity.