An automated low cost IoT based Fertilizer Intimation System for smart agriculture

Abstract This paper presents an Internet of Things (IoT) based system by designing a novel Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium (NPK) sensor with Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) and Light Emitting Diodes (LED). The principle of colorimetric is used to monitor and analyze the nutrients present in the soil. The data sensed by the designed NPK sensor from the selected agricultural fields are sent to Google cloud database to support fast retrieval of data. The concept of fuzzy logic is applied to detect the deficiency of nutrients from the sensed data. The crisp value of each sensed data is discriminated into five fuzzy values namely very low, low, medium, high and very high during fuzzification. A set of If-then rules are framed based on individual chemical solutions of Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P) and Potassium (K). Mamdani inference procedure is used to derive the conclusion about the deficiency of N, P and K available in soil chosen for testing and accordingly an alert message is sent to the farmer about the quantity of fertilizer to be used at regular intervals. The proposed hardware prototype and the software embedded in the microcontroller are developed in Raspberry pi 3 using Python. The developed model is tested in three different soil samples like red soil, mountain soil and desert soil. It is observed that the developed system results in linear variation with respect to the concentration of the soil solution. A sensor network scenario is created using Qualnet simulator to analyze the performance of designed NPK sensor in terms of throughput, end to end delay and jitter. From the different variety of experiments conducted, it is noticed that the developed IoT system is found to be helpful to the farmers for high yielding of crops.