Space Apps Challenge 2017

Background:-Nepal is an agriculture country almost, 70% people are engaged in agriculture.But then also Nepal import huge amount of Agro Product from other countries. Latest data show that Nepal import NRs 137.12 billion of Agro product in fiscal year of 2014-15.Its accounted for 17.47 % of total imports of NRs 784.58 billion.This data encourage us to do the project Related on agriculture.

The main objectives of our Project are

• To know the current moisture level of agriculture field and forecast drought and irrigate automatically.
• To make agriculture smart, productive and efficient by using digital technology.

In those two days ,we designed a Prototype of a system having following Features

It is a smart agriculture project which consist of following Features.

i. The system has a LCD display which shows current moisture level of field, temperature, humidity, water pump on/off state, irrigation pump on/off state, exhaust fan on/off state with GSM technology for information and control. Although the whole system is automatic, farmer can also interfere the process according to the need.

ii. Moisture level detection of small and large field using robotic technology which can measure moisture value of different place of a field log that data in memory card, analyzing the data and automatically controls irrigation pump according to moisture level data and water level data of reservoir.

iii. Controlling the motor of reservoir according to the water level of it automatically. I.e. turning water pump motor on when reservoir has less water and turning motor off when reservoir is fully filled automatically.

iv. Measurement of temperature and humidity of field and controlling these environment variables using exhaust for small scale farming like vertical farming, artificial greenhouse .

v. Use of GSM technology so that farmer or owner can get information about temperature, moisture, humidity, water level of reservoir and primary source of water, irrigation pump state, reservoir pump state, exhaust fan state etc. Using these information, farmer can take action according to the data received.

vi. Farmer can send the message to run or stop the feature of the system like sending “s” in message to turn irrigation pump off etc.

vii. For commercial farming, we have developed a system based on Internet of thing so that there will be more graphical user interface and data analysis tools with computer vision system.

Application Area of Smart Agriculture system:

Our system can be used in following area and farms

• Large agriculture field (paddy, corn, maize, potato, wheat, mustard etc) in Terai where drought detection and automatic irrigation can be done by system and local farmers by using GSM technology or any type of mobile phone.
• Commercial vegetable farming is highly favorable with this technology where most of its feature can be used to increase productivity.
• Indoor and small scale farming is very much suited with this technology where all this system with internet of thing can be used. Also the computer vision system and complete automation for adjustment of artificial environmental condition saves time.
• High altitude farming is also suitable with our automatic reservoir filling and automatic water irrigation system using electric water pump.
• Our system gives most of the information required for a farmer and they can take action and save time and money. Our system is farmer friendly with little training and we will be trying to improve and update it always.

Conclusion and future upgrade plan:

So we developed a fully functioning system to make agriculture system smart and automatic using various sensors and GSM technology. With the data gathered in our system, a farmer can take decision what to do and what not to do for the better of plants.

There may be lots of technical problems and agriculture problems that the farmers are facing and we are not addressing but we can collaborate with farmers and work to resolve the problem with current digital technology to increase productivity and reliability.

We are thinking of studying agriculture problem from farmers and experts and making upgrade on it by introducing different features like soil PH sensor, Reliable computer vision for monitoring, cost effective system, more farmer friendly, efficient drought forecasting by taking online data and informing farmers in easy public way.