Improving Greenhouse's Automation and Data Acquisition with Mobile Robot Controlled System via Wireless Sensor Network

The function of a greenhouse is to create the optimal growing conditions for the full lifecycle of the plants. Using autonomous measuring stations helps to monitor all the necessary parameters for creating the optimal environment in the greenhouse. The robot equipped with sensors is capable of driving to the end and back along crop rows inside the greenhouse. This chaper deals with the implementation of mobile measuring station in greenhouse environment. It introduces a wireless sensor network that was used for the purpose of measuring and controlling the greenhouse application. Continuous advancements in wireless technology and miniaturization have made the deployment of sensor networks to monitor various aspects of the environment increasingly flexible. Climate monitoring is vitally important to the operation in greenhouses and the quality of the collected information has a great influence on the precision and accuracy of control results. Currently, the agro-alimentary market field incorporates diverse data acquisition techniques. Normally, the type of acquisition system is chosen to be optimal for the control algorithm to be used. For traditional climate monitoring and control systems, all sensors are distributed through the greenhouse and connected to the device performing the control tasks. These equipments use time-based data sampling techniques as a consequence of using time-based controllers. Typical applications of WSNs include monitoring, tracking, and controlling. Some of the specific applications are habitat monitoring, object tracking, etc. In a typical application, a WSN is scattered in a region where it is meant to collect data through its sensor node. The WSN-based controller has allowed a considerable decrease in the number of changes in the control action and made possible a study of the compromise between quantity of transmission and control performance. In modern greenhouses, several measurement points are required to trace down the local climate parameters in different parts of the big greenhouse to make the greenhouse automation system work properly. Cabling would make the measurement system expensive and vulnerable. Moreover, the cabled measurement points are difficult to relocate once they are installed. Thus, a wireless 1