The internet of plants: Sensing plant growth parameters for autonomous greenhouse control

Agriculture and food constitute a hugely significant element of the Irish economy in terms of jobs and exports, and its long-term competitiveness and sustainability is a priority concern of national policy. The continuous development and application of new knowledge and new technologies is crucial to the realisation of national policy objectives for the sector. Agriculture is a very important industry worldwide. The world has an ever growing population placing a demand for increased yield in food production to provide for this growth. Productivity enhancement through nanotechnology-driven precision farming and maximization of output and minimization of inputs through better monitoring and targeted action is desirable for economic and environmental reasons. This paper demonstrates a complete IoT enabled agricultural eco system to enable precision management of resources in an agricultural setting. Incorporating remote sensing, actuation and control capability, it shows how a typical IoT system works in practice, on an example of a "Smart Greenhouse" that is connected to the internet. The data is collected by various sensor technologies. It is aggregated and pre-processed in a microcontroller that transmits it using a low-power radio module to a nearby gateway for local processing and data analysis and actuation implementation. The gateway relays the information to a back-end cloud system that stores, processes and presents the collected information to enable visualisation of the data sets and cloud based analytics of the status of the Smart Greenhouse.