Final ReportSummary - WATER-BEE (Low cost, easy to use Intelligent Irrigation Scheduling System)
The WATER-BEE project designed a prototype of an intelligent irrigation system. Sensor nodes measure soil moisture content and environmental parameters and send the data to a database where it is analysed by intelligent agents. These agents then determine whether or not to irrigate. The system is controlled through an easy to use, flexible, database-driven user interface that enables growers to monitor and control their fields in real-time.
After months of development work, the prototype was extensively tested in field trials across Europe. When the results of these trials were compared with a commercially standard method of scheduling irrigation, WATER-BEE resulted in a saving in irrigation by volume of up to 51 %. The majority of field experiments also demonstrated that the system was highly reliable and practical.
WATER-BEE has been developed for use in small and medium sized agricultural holdings. Extensive consultation with industry stakeholders, undertaken at the beginning of the WATER-BEE project, indicated that this group currently lack affordable, easy to use automated irrigation equipment. They rely on other methods for determining irrigation, which are often either too subjective or incomplete. Should their irrigation decision be wrong, crop yield and quality can suffer considerably. A poor crop can have a huge impact on the profitability of holdings.
WATER-BEE increases the efficiency of water use by only irrigating when necessary and the amount necessary. This benefits agriculturalists in terms of savings on labour and water and improved crop quality and yield. WATER-BEE could also have a significant socio-economic impact by conserving water supplies and minimising water pollution in surface and ground waters. Should the technology be applied in other areas, such as golf course and sports field irrigation, the benefits that come from efficiently using water could stretch even further.
Project context and objectives:
The aim of this project team is to develop the prototype of WATER-BEE, an intelligent, flexible, easy-to-use but accurate irrigation scheduling system at an affordable cost that takes advantage of recent technological advances in wireless networking (ZigBee), environmental sensors and improvements in crop modelling. The availability of low-cost wireless sensor networks will allow a higher density of soil moisture data to be collected from the growing area than was previously possible, providing a more accurate two or three dimensional map of soil water status. This improved soil data would then be combined with other appropriate environmental data, such as historical and forecast meteorological data. Intelligent software would process the information and then control irrigation events to precisely match the needs of the crop. For the most part, and in fully automatic mode, growers will enjoy a system that offers total irrigation management, whereby the WATER-BEE system will respond rapidly to changing conditions, continually optimising growing conditions and water use efficiency. The aim is to keep the system as affordable and flexible as possible, for it to be easy to install and maintain and to ensure its widespread uptake by European farmers, growers, hotels, golf clubs, and even domestic homeowners.
The WATER-BEE system should fulfil the following performance objectives, in order to ensure its widespread uptake by small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) growers and irrigators at European level:
- The system should be easy to deploy and run, as well as facilitate irrigation scheduling tasks. In light of the target group, growers, these features of WATER-BEE will be of paramount importance to ensuring that the results of this project are indeed exploitable by as many SME growers and irrigators as possible. The system will greatly simplify irrigation scheduling for growers and will reduce the onus on management expertise for routine calculations and control measurements. By providing remote data acquisition and automation of all calculations, where previously experts would be required to interpret measurements, WATER-BEE will greatly facilitate this task by enabling trained users to apply the principles without having to understand the detail and by reducing the input parameters for different crops, soils and irrigation systems. The user interface will be designed to be simple to navigate and control and the grower will be able to remotely monitor the performance of WATER-BEE and carry out any control commands.
- The system should be modular and flexible to ensure that the solution can be used or appropriately adapted for different types of crops, horticulture and trees, that it can incorporate different sets of sensors and that it can provide output for different types for watering devises. It also needs to be capable of catering for large areas, and it envisaged that the sensor network could be used over an area of up to 50 ha, for a large irrigated farm, and could be used to inform farmers which field on the farm to irrigate when. Furthermore, it should have a 'similarly flexible' interface.The system design should be sufficiently robust, reliable and secure. Given that the sensors will be underground they will need to be very robust. Research into encasing existing disposable chip sensors in a robust and watertight plastic sleeve (with a printed battery) will be carried out and placing them in the earth at the end of a plastic antenna strap, etc.
- The system should be cost effective enough to ensure its widespread uptake by SME farmers across Europe. The aim is to offer the basic WATER-BEE platform kit (software application, Gateway Unit, and 25 ZigBee nodes) for a cost not exceeding EUR 5000. It is hoped to offer soil sensors for the system at an approximate price not exceeding EUR 15; however, promising preliminary research has revealed that effective soil sensors might be feasible at a cost as little as EUR 4, depending on volumes. The overall objective would be to arrive at an annual system cost / hectare, including sensor and maintenance costs, of some EUR 350.
- WATER-BEE will result in increased water use efficiency of existing water systems, such as drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, centre pivot irrigation, lateral move irrigation, etc. by maintaining yields with a lower water input. In some cases where yields are limited by under or over- irrigation we would expect to see an increase in yield.
Project results:
There is a clear need for growers to optimise and reduce their water consumption, both in order to minimise natural resources and production costs, as well as to optimise crop yield and quality. Irrigation management decisions are critical: over-irrigation wastes water, energy and labour and it leads to leaching of expensive nutrients beyond the root zone. When irrigation is insufficient, crops initially will make rapid adaptive responses to drying soil that limit growth and productivity, and then, as water-stress progresses, the shoot water status will decline to the point where growth halts and crops fail.
WATER-BEE, as a low cost, easy to use intelligent irrigation scheduling system, will provide growers with an advanced controlled irrigation system that will enable them to manage their irrigation system with a view to optimising crop yield and quality. To date, commercially available intelligent irrigation systems aim to reduce the usage of water, whereas WATER-BEE provides an effective irrigation treatment, tailored to meet the water needs of each specific crop throughout its growing season.
To achieve this, WATER-BEE will combine the latest developments in terms of crops research, intelligent agent technology and state of the art communication protocols.
In short, in order to provide effective irrigation treatment, the WATER-BEE system uses data from soil moisture sensors installed at various depths at the roots and along several pre-defined zones in the field. All sensor data is wirelessly transmitted and stored in a central database together with weather information. The irrigation criteria is based on a model that, from the available soil water content in the roots, calculates a recommended threshold based on the crop, soil and weather. The intelligent agents appropriately combine the model information with all the sensor data, the weather information and the specific needs of each crop in order to arrive to the final decision of when to irrigate and how much water to apply. The user-friendly, WATER-BEE User Interface allows the user to readily monitor all related information, including sensor soil moisture readings, weather information, as well as system alarms. When WATER-BEE is used in full automatic control, actuator nodes will be employed to act upon the irrigation decisions by turning on the appropriate valves and pumps. Data from the field trials indicate that water cost savings resulting from use of WATER-BEE can reach 20 % to 40 % annually. WATER-BEE also reduces the time required to plan irrigation by 80 %, thereby increasing productivity. Furthermore, improved plant health increases yields by between 5 % and 15 % annually, delivering 10 % to 25 % higher profitability to the user. These positive results give weight to the USPs of WATER-BEE and give it a strong basis from which it can be commercialised and successfully enter the market.
Description of the system
Based on the needs and specifications of the industry, the positive results obtained from the technology validation and the continuous input from the SME partners, a comprehensive prototype was defined. It has positioned the SMEs very competitively in terms of possibilities to commercialise the system. This pre-competitive prototype encompasses sensor nodes (1 and 2), with 3 soil moisture sensors attached to each. These periodically send ZigBee packets to a gateway that acts as the central point in the network and as the coordinator for the wireless sensor network. The communication is bidirectional and the gateway is able to re-program the frequency of readings of each sensor node on-the-fly, as well as some other configuration parameters, such as the 16-bit network address of the nodes or the maximum number of hops a message can make. The gateway also has inputs from weather (3) and actuator nodes (4). The weather node provides important parameters for model calculations, such as: temperature; wind speed and direction; solar radiation, humidity and pressure. The interaction with the actuator nodes, as is the case for the sensor node, is also capable of bidirectional communication, and messages will include data on litres per second of water flowing through the pipes, as well as execution orders such as open / close valves or pumps.
The data flow from the field to the central server database can be implemented using different telecommunication technologies. The information from the field will be transmitted periodically via backup files and stored in 'dynamic tables'. This data, combined with parameters from the 'static tables', together with the weather forecast is used by the irrigation model to calculate the volumetric water content in the soil and therefore estimate the current irrigation.
The outputs of these model calculations are then used by the intelligent agents to fuse available information in order to decide on the next irrigation event and, at the same time, to detect any faulty behaviour in the system (due to a bad measurement or a contradictory model result). Intelligent agents read from and write to the same central database where all the information remains safely stored.
The user interface is designed to display the values from the database. Via the user interface, growers can readily see what is happening in the fields, when the next irrigation event will take place, how many litres of water have been used, or the soil moisture levels in each zone. During the design of the user interface, all the needs and limitations of the target group have been considered to deliver an interface that growers will find simple and easy to use, as well as effective.
Potential impact:
Agricultural production plays a vital role in supporting individual livelihoods and the wider economy, not to mention the importance of food for health and well being, as well as the pleasure that is derived from eating good food.
However, food production also consumes significant amounts of water, which is an equally vital resource. In Europe as a whole, agriculture accounts for 24 % of water abstraction, with only about a third of this being returned to a water body. In some southern European regions, agriculture accounts for more than 80 % of water abstraction, with usage peaking in the summer when water is least available, thereby maximising its detrimental impacts.
Globally, humans appropriate more than 50 % of all renewable and accessible freshwater, while billions still lack the most basic water services.
The socio-economic impact of a technology such as WATER-BEE, which will assist growers in optimising water usage and yields, will indeed be far reaching.
Furthermore, the results of WATER-BEE show great promise for delivering a leap in competitiveness and productivity for growers by improving the quality and yield of the harvest. Growers will be in a position to respond to growing market demands for lower prices and better quality. This presents a great contribution to safeguarding and creating employment as well as increasing transnational technological cooperation in the European Union (EU).
These positive aspects are backed up by the willingness of growers to invest in such a new technology and improvements and the level of investment they might be willing to consider.
The contribution to improving European standards and reducing the use of valuable water resources will improve the quality of life, health and safety of European citizens as well as provide for protection of food supplies.
Project website: http://www.water-bee.eu(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)
After months of development work, the prototype was extensively tested in field trials across Europe. When the results of these trials were compared with a commercially standard method of scheduling irrigation, WATER-BEE resulted in a saving in irrigation by volume of up to 51 %. The majority of field experiments also demonstrated that the system was highly reliable and practical.
WATER-BEE has been developed for use in small and medium sized agricultural holdings. Extensive consultation with industry stakeholders, undertaken at the beginning of the WATER-BEE project, indicated that this group currently lack affordable, easy to use automated irrigation equipment. They rely on other methods for determining irrigation, which are often either too subjective or incomplete. Should their irrigation decision be wrong, crop yield and quality can suffer considerably. A poor crop can have a huge impact on the profitability of holdings.
WATER-BEE increases the efficiency of water use by only irrigating when necessary and the amount necessary. This benefits agriculturalists in terms of savings on labour and water and improved crop quality and yield. WATER-BEE could also have a significant socio-economic impact by conserving water supplies and minimising water pollution in surface and ground waters. Should the technology be applied in other areas, such as golf course and sports field irrigation, the benefits that come from efficiently using water could stretch even further.
Project context and objectives:
The aim of this project team is to develop the prototype of WATER-BEE, an intelligent, flexible, easy-to-use but accurate irrigation scheduling system at an affordable cost that takes advantage of recent technological advances in wireless networking (ZigBee), environmental sensors and improvements in crop modelling. The availability of low-cost wireless sensor networks will allow a higher density of soil moisture data to be collected from the growing area than was previously possible, providing a more accurate two or three dimensional map of soil water status. This improved soil data would then be combined with other appropriate environmental data, such as historical and forecast meteorological data. Intelligent software would process the information and then control irrigation events to precisely match the needs of the crop. For the most part, and in fully automatic mode, growers will enjoy a system that offers total irrigation management, whereby the WATER-BEE system will respond rapidly to changing conditions, continually optimising growing conditions and water use efficiency. The aim is to keep the system as affordable and flexible as possible, for it to be easy to install and maintain and to ensure its widespread uptake by European farmers, growers, hotels, golf clubs, and even domestic homeowners.
The WATER-BEE system should fulfil the following performance objectives, in order to ensure its widespread uptake by small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) growers and irrigators at European level:
- The system should be easy to deploy and run, as well as facilitate irrigation scheduling tasks. In light of the target group, growers, these features of WATER-BEE will be of paramount importance to ensuring that the results of this project are indeed exploitable by as many SME growers and irrigators as possible. The system will greatly simplify irrigation scheduling for growers and will reduce the onus on management expertise for routine calculations and control measurements. By providing remote data acquisition and automation of all calculations, where previously experts would be required to interpret measurements, WATER-BEE will greatly facilitate this task by enabling trained users to apply the principles without having to understand the detail and by reducing the input parameters for different crops, soils and irrigation systems. The user interface will be designed to be simple to navigate and control and the grower will be able to remotely monitor the performance of WATER-BEE and carry out any control commands.
- The system should be modular and flexible to ensure that the solution can be used or appropriately adapted for different types of crops, horticulture and trees, that it can incorporate different sets of sensors and that it can provide output for different types for watering devises. It also needs to be capable of catering for large areas, and it envisaged that the sensor network could be used over an area of up to 50 ha, for a large irrigated farm, and could be used to inform farmers which field on the farm to irrigate when. Furthermore, it should have a 'similarly flexible' interface.The system design should be sufficiently robust, reliable and secure. Given that the sensors will be underground they will need to be very robust. Research into encasing existing disposable chip sensors in a robust and watertight plastic sleeve (with a printed battery) will be carried out and placing them in the earth at the end of a plastic antenna strap, etc.
- The system should be cost effective enough to ensure its widespread uptake by SME farmers across Europe. The aim is to offer the basic WATER-BEE platform kit (software application, Gateway Unit, and 25 ZigBee nodes) for a cost not exceeding EUR 5000. It is hoped to offer soil sensors for the system at an approximate price not exceeding EUR 15; however, promising preliminary research has revealed that effective soil sensors might be feasible at a cost as little as EUR 4, depending on volumes. The overall objective would be to arrive at an annual system cost / hectare, including sensor and maintenance costs, of some EUR 350.
- WATER-BEE will result in increased water use efficiency of existing water systems, such as drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, centre pivot irrigation, lateral move irrigation, etc. by maintaining yields with a lower water input. In some cases where yields are limited by under or over- irrigation we would expect to see an increase in yield.
Project results:
There is a clear need for growers to optimise and reduce their water consumption, both in order to minimise natural resources and production costs, as well as to optimise crop yield and quality. Irrigation management decisions are critical: over-irrigation wastes water, energy and labour and it leads to leaching of expensive nutrients beyond the root zone. When irrigation is insufficient, crops initially will make rapid adaptive responses to drying soil that limit growth and productivity, and then, as water-stress progresses, the shoot water status will decline to the point where growth halts and crops fail.
WATER-BEE, as a low cost, easy to use intelligent irrigation scheduling system, will provide growers with an advanced controlled irrigation system that will enable them to manage their irrigation system with a view to optimising crop yield and quality. To date, commercially available intelligent irrigation systems aim to reduce the usage of water, whereas WATER-BEE provides an effective irrigation treatment, tailored to meet the water needs of each specific crop throughout its growing season.
To achieve this, WATER-BEE will combine the latest developments in terms of crops research, intelligent agent technology and state of the art communication protocols.
In short, in order to provide effective irrigation treatment, the WATER-BEE system uses data from soil moisture sensors installed at various depths at the roots and along several pre-defined zones in the field. All sensor data is wirelessly transmitted and stored in a central database together with weather information. The irrigation criteria is based on a model that, from the available soil water content in the roots, calculates a recommended threshold based on the crop, soil and weather. The intelligent agents appropriately combine the model information with all the sensor data, the weather information and the specific needs of each crop in order to arrive to the final decision of when to irrigate and how much water to apply. The user-friendly, WATER-BEE User Interface allows the user to readily monitor all related information, including sensor soil moisture readings, weather information, as well as system alarms. When WATER-BEE is used in full automatic control, actuator nodes will be employed to act upon the irrigation decisions by turning on the appropriate valves and pumps. Data from the field trials indicate that water cost savings resulting from use of WATER-BEE can reach 20 % to 40 % annually. WATER-BEE also reduces the time required to plan irrigation by 80 %, thereby increasing productivity. Furthermore, improved plant health increases yields by between 5 % and 15 % annually, delivering 10 % to 25 % higher profitability to the user. These positive results give weight to the USPs of WATER-BEE and give it a strong basis from which it can be commercialised and successfully enter the market.
Description of the system
Based on the needs and specifications of the industry, the positive results obtained from the technology validation and the continuous input from the SME partners, a comprehensive prototype was defined. It has positioned the SMEs very competitively in terms of possibilities to commercialise the system. This pre-competitive prototype encompasses sensor nodes (1 and 2), with 3 soil moisture sensors attached to each. These periodically send ZigBee packets to a gateway that acts as the central point in the network and as the coordinator for the wireless sensor network. The communication is bidirectional and the gateway is able to re-program the frequency of readings of each sensor node on-the-fly, as well as some other configuration parameters, such as the 16-bit network address of the nodes or the maximum number of hops a message can make. The gateway also has inputs from weather (3) and actuator nodes (4). The weather node provides important parameters for model calculations, such as: temperature; wind speed and direction; solar radiation, humidity and pressure. The interaction with the actuator nodes, as is the case for the sensor node, is also capable of bidirectional communication, and messages will include data on litres per second of water flowing through the pipes, as well as execution orders such as open / close valves or pumps.
The data flow from the field to the central server database can be implemented using different telecommunication technologies. The information from the field will be transmitted periodically via backup files and stored in 'dynamic tables'. This data, combined with parameters from the 'static tables', together with the weather forecast is used by the irrigation model to calculate the volumetric water content in the soil and therefore estimate the current irrigation.
The outputs of these model calculations are then used by the intelligent agents to fuse available information in order to decide on the next irrigation event and, at the same time, to detect any faulty behaviour in the system (due to a bad measurement or a contradictory model result). Intelligent agents read from and write to the same central database where all the information remains safely stored.
The user interface is designed to display the values from the database. Via the user interface, growers can readily see what is happening in the fields, when the next irrigation event will take place, how many litres of water have been used, or the soil moisture levels in each zone. During the design of the user interface, all the needs and limitations of the target group have been considered to deliver an interface that growers will find simple and easy to use, as well as effective.
Potential impact:
Agricultural production plays a vital role in supporting individual livelihoods and the wider economy, not to mention the importance of food for health and well being, as well as the pleasure that is derived from eating good food.
However, food production also consumes significant amounts of water, which is an equally vital resource. In Europe as a whole, agriculture accounts for 24 % of water abstraction, with only about a third of this being returned to a water body. In some southern European regions, agriculture accounts for more than 80 % of water abstraction, with usage peaking in the summer when water is least available, thereby maximising its detrimental impacts.
Globally, humans appropriate more than 50 % of all renewable and accessible freshwater, while billions still lack the most basic water services.
The socio-economic impact of a technology such as WATER-BEE, which will assist growers in optimising water usage and yields, will indeed be far reaching.
Furthermore, the results of WATER-BEE show great promise for delivering a leap in competitiveness and productivity for growers by improving the quality and yield of the harvest. Growers will be in a position to respond to growing market demands for lower prices and better quality. This presents a great contribution to safeguarding and creating employment as well as increasing transnational technological cooperation in the European Union (EU).
These positive aspects are backed up by the willingness of growers to invest in such a new technology and improvements and the level of investment they might be willing to consider.
The contribution to improving European standards and reducing the use of valuable water resources will improve the quality of life, health and safety of European citizens as well as provide for protection of food supplies.
Project website: http://www.water-bee.eu(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)