Autonomous WSN for Lawns Monitoring in Smart Cities

Abstract

The urban lawns are frequently composed by different grass species to combat some problems of water scarcity and diseases. In order to maintain these lawns, high amount of water is required. Nowadays, smart cities can be understood as a new concept of city that includes, among others, efficient distribution of energy, water, and other resources by using technology. In these cases, the main challenge is to try to estimate the necessary amount of water for irrigation and the phytosanitary uses without wasting water. In this paper, we propose a method to identify the percentage of grass coverage in lawns to deduce the grass productivity and estimate the most accurate quantity of water to ensure a good production of grass. The system is based on a Smart Autonomous Vehicle (SAV) controlled by an Arduino Mega 2560. It also contains an array of 120 colour sensors used to gather the data. The selected colour sensor is a TCS3472. With these sensors, we obtain the RGB histograms of the lawns. For these experiments, we have several lawn parcels of 1.5 x 1 m. From these, a matrix of 150 x 100 RGB values is obtained. After processing the green values of matrix, we have observed a correlation between the level of coverage and these values. The grass coverage is related with values of brightness between 40 and 60 which allow us to classify the lawn as a function of its coverage and the irrigation needs.

Urban Lawn Monitoring in Smart City Environments

“…In this subsection, we are going to describe the vegetal material used to verify the proposed classification system [9] in the previous work.…”

“…Once we have the matrix of the green component with the values of brightness, it is possible to apply the methodology described by [9]. So, firstly, we obtain the green histograms shown in Figure 8.…”

“…In this section, we present the verification process to apply to the system developed by 7 Journal of Sensors [9]. In order to verify it, we used new grass plots, and using the pictures obtained with the Arduino camera, we extracted the desired values used to perform the comparison.…”

“…The proposed system is composed of an Arduino node with a CMOS sensor. Our system is based on the idea developed by [9]. We will verify this system and will compare it with the proposed solution based on a drone.…”

“…The use of drones for monitoring purposes is increasing, and they can be used even for emergency rescue systems [8]. The last option for grass monitoring is the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with RGB sensors [9]. The system is based on one small automated vehicle (SAW) that moves along the garden taking data about the grass coverage with the RGB sensors.…”