Development and Evaluation of Smart Drip Irrigation System for Egg Plant using Internet of Things

An optimized irrigation system maximizes agricultural productivity, ensures efficient water use, and reduces off-site effects caused by excess percolation of water. To address the problems associated with conventional irrigation systems, a drip irrigation system that is based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology for automation of irrigation scheduling was developed and tested for Egg Plant (Brinjal) crop in vertisols. The study compared crop performance under two different drip irrigation systems — one based on IoT and the other based on crop evapotranspiration (ETc). An intelligent data collection system, including sensors and a microcontroller was used in the experiment to monitor relative humidity, soil temperature, air temperature, and soil moisture content. The sensors collect data wirelessly transmitted to a cloud server via the IoT, allowing worldwide access from anywhere. The performance of the egg plant crop revealed significantly higher plant height and crop yield (12.05%) under a drip irrigation system utilizing IoT technology, which could be due to the optimum and timely application of water over ETc-based drip irrigation. Along with improved crop performance, water savings of 35.2% were observed as compared to ETc-based drip irrigation. The developed system can be evaluated in a large field with several sensors together along with a mobile app for a user-friendly system.