Volume 4, Issue 6, June – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology

ISSN No:-2456-2165

Agridrone: Automation of Agriculture using IoT

Suvarna Nandyal Priya S Khamitkar Priyanka S Joshi
HOD and Professor UG Student UG Student
Dept of Computer Science Dept of Computer Science Dept of Computer Science
PDA College of Engineering PDA College of Engineering PDA college of Engineering
Gulbarga Gulbarga Gulbarga

Abstract:- Agriculture is oldest profession of mankind. agriculture. The improvement in technology is essential to
Very specifically, 80 percent of Indian population is yield high crop rate. Drones are high and reliable
engaged in agriculture related activities. No one can instruments flying in the sky and can be used by farmers to
deny that farmers are losing their lives due to un- inspect the farms conditions at the beginning of any crop
manageable debts increase due to failure of crops. Crop year.
failures are due to various reasons. One of the main
reason in crop failures is due to manual based, very The drones are used to help farmers to take better care
traditional and un-scientific agriculture practices. In for their crop and get higher yield from crops. The drones
this work, an intelligent system is developed to watch use a wide area of technology including infrared cameras,
the development of crops and various other very timely sensors and GPS to help farmers to monitor and better care
parameters of crops development. The new system for their farms. Drones can drastically cut the cost of
proposed here consists of a flying drone fitted with a monitoring crops and they can drastically cut down on
camera eye to record images of crops in a scheduled water waste. Drones can also reduce the amount of
time. The work involves developing an intelligent chemicals being released into the environment, preventing
system by building a knowledge-base to guide negative effects on environment. Having drones go on auto
agriculturists. The knowledge-base includes various missions rather than farmers having to control them would
cases of various crops and decisions based on crop also be ideal.
image analysis. From captured images, the parameters
that are planned for analysis by image processing are, Many farmers want the ability to capture video as well
the amount of green in leaf detection, moisture content as stills and the want something that is time efficient. With
in soil with supporting IoTs etc. The image of the plant the world’s population growing the need for more food will
will be acquired using the external camera eye fitted on grow as well and the pressure on farmers to produce larger
drone which is interfaced with Raspberry Pi along with quantities will increase. The drone will allow farmers to
other different sensors modules through IOT. To detect produce greater yield.
green leaf we have to install Android studio in which
PlantDoctorMaster-debug.apk file is created. Now we Using the most efficient and compatible technology, a
have to copy this apk file in the handset where TH few proposed solutions have been mentioned which can be
classify application is installed. integrated with Raspberry Pi to provide better drones for
agriculture.
In this application select the photo captured by the
Drone and the image is stored in the Raspberry pi and The drones provide precise ground truth information,
now diagnose the result of the selected image and we more accurate images as they are closer to the ground. By
will get the confidence value.This proposed new system using drones, we can adjust and measure the distance from
has practical importance both practically and terrain, calculate depth level, measure water stress level of
commercial wise. crops, physiological features of crops and many more
applications.
Keywords:- Agriculture, Drone, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle,
Raspberry Pi, Internet of Things, Sensors. Developing a farmer friendly intelligent crop
information system which is equipped with drone and
I. INTRODUCTION camera eye for assisting farmers to understand vital
information about crops for enabling farmer to take better
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has been in use decision in taking care of their crops and thereby increasing
since 1980 and their applications are expanding rapidly. the productivity of agriculture. Due to the migration of
There are various applications of drones right from simple village people to cities and increased industrialization farms
photography to military spy. In this work drone is used as are facing labour problem. Agricultural producers must
camera carrying vehicle to get precious information about embrace revolutionary strategies for producing food,
crops. As IoT (Internet of Things) becomes more increasing productivity and making sustainability a priority.
commercialized, various IoT concepts can be integrated
into agriculture drones to help improve agriculture. India’s
main source to increase the economy of nation is
agriculture. Majority of industries depends on products of

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Volume 4, Issue 6, June – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
II. LITERATURE SURVEY entire process was controlled with the help of a transmitter
at ground level. A camera was used to monitor the live
Deepak Murugan - “Development of an Adaptive spraying operation.
Approach for Precision Agriculture Monitoring with Drone
and Satellite Data”[2017] . Have proposed an approach for Patterson - “Recent trends in the Internet of Things”,
precision agriculture monitoring. It helps to distinguish IEEE 7th Annual Computing and Communication
between a sparse and a dense field using available data Workshop and Conference (CCWC), [2017]. Present novel
from the satellite and the drone. This approach works with work on autonomously identifying Safe Landing Zones
image statistics of a region and helps to minimize drone (SLZs) through image analysis which can be utilized upon
activity. occurrence of a safety critical event.

Paolo Tripicchio - “Towards Smart Farming and Delle Fave- “fav,Aero varmint’s global observer,
Sustainable Agriculture with Drones.”, International Flying high, again, April 06, 2011, Accessed October 27
Conference onIntelligent Environments (IE), [2015]. Have [2012] from defence industry.. Present a case study
stressed on the popularity of drones used in agriculture. whereby it is applied the max-sum algorithm to coordinate
With the help of an RGB-D sensor connected to the drone, a team of UAVs to provide live aerial imagery to the first
various ploughing techniques can be distinguished. Two responders operating in the area of a disaster.
different algorithms are used to differentiate between the
ploughing fields. Xie -”The Research of Support Vector Machine in
Agricultural Data Classification”, International Conference
Marthinus Reinecke - , “The influence of on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture,
dronemonitoring on crop health and harvest size.”, 1st Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture
International Conference on Next Generation Computing [2014]. Present a design framework of the UAV platform
Applications (NextComp), [2017]. Have proposed the based atmospheric environmental emergency monitoring
usage of drones for the betterment of crop quality. This system with regard to the components, functions and
could help the farmers increase their production by procedures.
detecting the loopholes beforehand. The crops could be
managed by using specific cameras connected to the drones Himadri Nath Saha - “Recent trends in the Internet of
to detect water shortages and harmful pests. Things”, IEEE 7th Annual Computing and Communication
Workshop and Conference (CCWC), [2017]. Analyzing of
Floriano De Rango - “A simulator for UAVs data that is uploaded in cloud, support vector machine or
management in agriculture domain.”, International SVM is used, which is a supervised learning model,
Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and integrated with machine learning algorithm that mainly
Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS), [2017]. Have focuses on regression and classification problems. The
proposed the usage of a simulator that is suited to the main objective of the SVM is to train a model such that it
agricultural fields. This simulator would coordinate with assigns the new objects to a specific category. It starts by
the UAV and control the activity of the UAV in the modeling the situation which creates a feature space (vector
presence of harmful insects in the crops. It would also space of finite dimension) wherein each dimension depicts
consider various other parameters like energy and the a "feature" of a certain object. SVM selects the most
communication range of the drones. optimal solution. The SVM can also be used in precision
agriculture using UAV.
Rodrigo Filev Maia - “Precision agriculture using
remote monitoring systems in Brazil.”, IEEE Global F.G. Costa and et.al - The use of unmanned aerial
Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), [2017]. vehicles and wireless sensor network in agriculture
Have discussed about an IoT device which is used to applications. IEEE Int. Geoscience and Remote Sensing
monitor various agricultural parameters. The device uses a Symposium, 2012. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
network of sensors for measuring the soil temperature, represent technological developments used for precision
humidity, moisture etc. The test was carried out in Sao agriculture. They provide high-resolution images taken
Paulo, Brazil. Reference climate data was taken to support from crops and when specific indices are applied, useful
various decisions on crop life and its sustainability. outputs for farm management decision-making are
produced. The current paper provides a literature review on
D. Yallappa - "Development and evaluation of drone- the use of UAVs in agriculture and specific applications are
mounted sprayer for pesticide applications to crops.", IEEE presented.
Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC),
[2017]. Have proposed the design of a drone which would J. Primicerio et al-, A flexible unmanned aerial
be helpful for spraying necessary chemicals on crops. This vehicle for precision agriculture. Precision Agriculture
helps reduce the cost of pesticide application. The proposed 13(4), 517-523, 2012-An unmanned aerial vehicle
sprayer is said to consist of 6 BLDC motors. A 5L capacity (''VIPtero'') was assembled and tested with the aim of
conical chamber was used to hold the pesticide solution. A developing a flexible and powerful tool for site-specific
DC motor coupled with a pump was used to pressurize the vineyard management.
solution into fine droplets by means of four nozzles. The

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Volume 4, Issue 6, June – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
D. Anthony, et.al- On crop height estimation with  Raspberry pi
UAVs. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conference on Intelligent Robots and The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board
System, 2014- . In this paper, we present a UAV-mounted computers developed in the United Kingdom by
measurement system that utilizes a laser scanner to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Raspberry pi consists of 40
compute crop heights, a critical indicator of crop health. pins in which 8 pins are Ground pins and 4 pins are Power
The system filters, transforms, and analyzes the cluttered pins i.e power pins are 1,2,4,17 and ground pins are
range data in real-time to determine the distance to the 6,9,14,20,25,30,34,39. Processor speed ranges from
ground and to the top of the crops. 700 MHz to 1.4 GHz,memory ranges from 256 MB to
1 GB RAM SD cards are used to store the operating
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE system.The board have 4USB ports. For video
output,HDM1 port is supported. .It is an ARM-based low
cost and tiny SBC (Single Board Computer).

 Drone
Unmanned aerial vehicle technology covers
everything from the aerodynamics of the drone, materials in
the manufacture of the physical UAV, to the circuit boards,
chipset and software which are the brains of the drone. This
UAV is ideal to explain drone technology because it has
everything in one package. It includes the UAV, gimbal
and camera and uses some of the top drone technology on
the market today.

 Node MCU
NodeMCU is an open source IoT platform. It includes
firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi SoC from
Espress if Systems, and hardware which is based on the
ESP-12 module. The term "NodeMCU" by default refers to
Fig 1:- Green Leaf Detection the firmware rather than the development kits. The
firmware uses the Lua scripting language. It is based on
The Drone is connected through wifi module to the eLua project, and built on the Espress if Non-OS SDK
capture the images.Through raspberry pi we can able to for ESP8266. It uses many open source projects.
send the obtained converted digital equivalent of the
parameters over the internet and opencv allows this to  Soil Moisture Sensor
process the drone. The Raspberry pi is connected to the Soil moisture sensors measure the volumetric water
Display through HDMI cable and the power supply is given content in soil. Since the direct gravimetric measurement of
to it. We use hard disk (SD card) for the storage. free soil moisture requires removing, drying, and weighting
of a sample, soil moisture . sensors measure the volumetric
water content indirectly by using some other property of the
soil, such as electrical resistance, dielectric constant, or
interaction with neutrons, as a proxy for the moisture
content.

IV. WORK DESCRIPTION

 Considering connections, In this work, Drone is fitted

with camera eye via Wi-Fi module which is used to
capture live images and Videos.
 To capture live images and videos we have to install
THWiFi FPV application in the mobile phone and they
are stored in the same application.
 To detect Moisture content in the soil, the following
connections are to be followed.
 Connect the two pins of the moisture sensor to the two
Fig 2:- Soil Moisture Detection pins on the Amplifier circuit using jumper wires.
 Connect the Vcc from the Amplifier to the 3.3V pin on
To detect the moisture in the soil we use NodeMcu the NodeMCU.
which is connected to the power supply through Wifi  Connect the GND pin to the ground (GND) pin on the
module and moisture sensor is connected to the breadbroad NodeMCU.
which is used to check the moisture content in the soil and  Connect the Analog pin to the A0 pin on the
to check the dry land. NodeMCU. Connect NodeMCU to PC via a USB cable.

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Volume 4, Issue 6, June – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
 Now sign in to the “Thingspeak” now go to tools click
board > NodeMCU1.0>Port and choose the right port
and now upload the code.
 Now click on private view where the graph is displayed
with time and date.
 If there is no moisture content in soil then it is
considered as Dry land and fixed value of Dry land is
1024.
 To detect green leaf we have to install Android studio in
which PlantDoctorMaster-debug.apk file is created.
Now we have to copy this apk file in the handset where
TH classify application is installed.
 In this application select the photo captured by the
Drone and the image is stored in the Raspberry pi and
Fig 4:- Wet Land Detection
now diagnose the result of the selected image and we
will get the confidence value.

V. TEST CASES

Expected Actual
Parameters e=E-A
value value

Dry land 1024 1024 0

Wet land 754 760 6

Green leaf 1.00 0.980 0.02

Fig 5:- Green Leaf Detection
Brown soil 0.500 0.459 0.041

Red soil 0.742 0.731 0.011

Leaf spot 0.838 0.838 0.00

Table 1

VI. TEST RESULTS

Fig 6:- Red Soil Detection

Fig 3:- Dry Land Detection

Fig 7:- Brown Soil Detection

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Volume 4, Issue 6, June – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
Workshop and Conference (CCWC),
2017(Volume:33, Issue:32)
[8]. J. Primicerio et al -, A flexible unmanned aerial
vehicle for precision agriculture. Precision Agriculture
13(4), 517-523, 2012(Volume:115, Issue:7)
[9]. Lei Shi, Qiguo Duan, Xinming Ma, Mei Weng,”The
Research of Support Vector Machine in Agricultural
Data Classification”,International Conference on
Computer and Computing Technologies in
Agriculture, CCTA 2011: Computer and Computing
Technologies in Agriculture V pp 265-
269.(Volume:76,Issue:43)
[10]. Marthinus Reinecke, “The influence of drone
Fig 8:- Leaf Spot Detection monitoring on crop health and harvest size.” 1st
International Conference on Next Generation
VII. CONCLUSION Computing Applications (Next Comp), 2017.
(Volume: 75, Issue:6)
Drones or UAVs will be of immense help in the field [11]. Paolo Tripicchio, “Towards Smart Farming and
of agriculture with the increase in population as they are Sustainable Agriculture with Drones.”, International
essential at the very beginning of a crop cycle. It will not Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE),
only reduce time but also yield better cultivation based on 2015.(Volume:44, Issue:81)
analyzed data. Crop management will be more efficient due [12]. Petterson,“Recent trends in the Internet of Things”,
to systematic monitoring. With the upcoming technologies, IEEE 7th Annual Computing and Communication
the production rate will increase rapidly with lesser Workshop and Conference (CCWC),
consumption of energy. The major advantage of Drone is 2017(Volume:412, Issue:77)
the auto landing capability which reduces the risk factors [13]. Rodrigo Filev Maia,“Precision agriculture using
designed in a simple and cost effective manner. The study remote monitoring systems in Brazil.”, IEEE Global
investigated the importance of drones in agriculture and is Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), 2017.
regarded as an eye-opener in industry and agriculture for (Volume:36, Issue:79)
development and integration of more drones for making [14]. Theerapat Pobkrut, Tanthip Eamsa-ard, eerakiat
agriculture tasks better in near future. Kerdcharoen, “Sensor Drone for Aerial Odor
Mapping for Agriculture and Security
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