Funded Projects

Soil moisture (SM) measurements are critical for efficient irrigation scheduling to determine when and how much water to apply to prevent over- or under-irrigation. Over-irrigation leads to fertilizer, energy, and water wastages with dire environmental consequences. Under-irrigation reduces plant quality and yield. SM is a vital factor that captures the state of the interplay between food-energy-water, making the monitoring and understanding of SM central to gaining insights into how the natural environment functions and responds to change. While spatial distributions of SM is dependent on multiple factors, conventional techniques for monitoring SM provide only point measurements that are spatially limited and unable to capture the joint behavior of the soil moisture regime. This proposal endeavors to develop a wireless sensor network to obtain saptio-temporal varying SM profiles will permits easy implementation of distributed control of irrigation in center-pivot irrigation. Specifically, we proposed a MI (Magnetic Induction) based large range SM sensing technique. While the MI wireless transceivers provide sufficient coverage range of the SM sensing, the collaborations among the distributed sensors in the field provide accurate estimation of SM even in the inhomogeneous underground environment. In this project, we will first develop the theoretical model to analyze and design the proposed system. Based on the model, we will implement the system in lab environment and initiate the experiments. Finally, field experiments using the developed testbed will be conducted to validate the proposed technique.