u-Agri

u­Agri is an initiative to apply Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to the Agricultural sector to automate weather data acquisition from fields thereby facilitating Decision Support Advisories. The weather data   thus   gathered   may   pertain   to   the   fundamental   pisions   in   the   agricultural   sector   namely   Soil Management, Irrigation Management and Pest Management.

The core architecture of u­Agri employs an emerging technology namely Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). WSN integrates sensing, computation, and radio transmission into a standalone unit which is called a 'mote'.  These motes are spatially deployed in the field and networked through domain specific network protocols.

Sensing being a domain specific entity in WSN, may be revised according to the requirements of the target application.   Therefore,   it   is   possible   to   sense   different   parameters     at   user   defined   periodicities.   Sensors required by the application may be integrated with the system on a need basis, thereby facilitating spatial availability of sensor information.

The focus of the project is Pest Management. u­Agri aims at studying the conducive weather conditions for the growth of pests. Weather data is acquired by deploying a WSN in target fields. Presently the project focuses on growing crops namely groundnut and castor and targeting pests and diseases like groundnut leaf miner and groundnut leaf spot respectively. The sensors which will be handy for this research are Temperature, Relative Humidity, Rainfall, Wind Speed, Soil Moisture & Temperature, Leaf Wetness and Solar Radiation.

Decision   Support   Advisories   are   developed   as   part   of   the   architecture   which   can   advise   the   possible infestation of the pests and diseases being targeted. Currently, disease models namely Leaf Wetness Index and Temperature­Relative Humidity Index based advisories have been developed for groundnut leaf spot. Growing Degree Day (GDD) calculations are also done for groundnut leaf miner.

The acrchitecture of u­Agri is as shown in the figure. There are three sub components in the system which are depicted as Farm Site, Gateway Subsystem and Remote Administration System. The Farm Site houses the WSN motes and connected to the sensors which are required. The motes internetwork among themselves and relay their data to the Gateway Subsystem which is also present on the field. The Gateway Subsytem is responsible for calibrating the sensor data from the Farm Site motes into their engineering units before storing them onto a local database. A seperate process on the Gateway Subsystem retrieves the locally stored WSN data and stores it onto the Remote Administraton System database over an active internet connection. The Remote Administration System implements mechanisms to view, analyze and plot the data. Required Decision Support Systems are also available on the Remote Administration System.

Remote Administration System Web Shots:

The uAgri component is an initiative of the Department of Information Technology (DIT) and is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Hyderabad with the domain expertise of the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture CRIDA), Hyderabad.