Development of Sensors-Based Agri-Food Traceability System Remotely Managed by a Software Platform for Optimized Farm Management

Abstract

<jats:p>The huge spreading of Internet of things (IoT)-oriented modern technologies is revolutionizing all fields of human activities, leading several benefits and allowing to strongly optimize classic productive processes. The agriculture field is also affected by these technological advances, resulting in better water and fertilizers’ usage and so huge improvements of both quality and yield of the crops. In this manuscript, the development of an IoT-based smart traceability and farm management system is described, which calibrates the irrigations and fertigation operations as a function of crop typology, growth phase, soil and environment parameters and weather information; a suitable software architecture was developed to support the system decision-making process, also based on data collected on-field by a properly designed solar-powered wireless sensor network (WSN). The WSN nodes were realized by using the ESP8266 NodeMCU module exploiting its microcontroller functionalities and Wi-Fi connectivity. Thanks to a properly sized solar power supply system and an optimized scheduling scheme, a long node autonomy was guaranteed, as experimentally verified by its power consumption measures, thus reducing WSN maintenance. In addition, a literature analysis on the most used wireless technologies for agri-food products’ traceability is reported, together with the design and testing of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) low-cost sensor tag to be applied into the containers of agri-food products, just collected from the fields or already processed, to monitor the main parameters indicative of any failure or spoiling over time along the supply chain. A mobile application was developed for monitoring the tracking information and storing conditions of the agri-food products. Test results in real-operative scenarios demonstrate the proper operation of the BLE smart tag prototype and tracking system.</jats:p>

Sensor Nodes and Communication Protocols of the Internet of Things Applied to Intelligent Agriculture

“…Once the correlation has been defined and based on the specifications given in each article, its characteristics can be extracted, which are expressed in Table 1. It can be seen that there are solutions that demand low energy consumption thanks to benefits special of its components, the same that accompanied by a battery charging system using alternative energies (self charge) make the estimated autonomy of the system is hundreds of days [17,[19][20][21][22]. On the other hand, some projects developed have a higher energy consumption so their autonomy time is reduced despite the fact that they have battery charging systems within their power supply system.…”

“…It is important to point out that in the aforementioned works, the autonomy estimate is not made considering 100% battery charge, it is considered a charge of 60 to 70%. Regarding the degrees of protection of the sensor nodes, several related works do not specify the characteristics of the containers, however in the description of their research, boxes that provide protection to the sensor nodes [12,19,21,24,26]; while most research shows the importance of protecting the elements against environmental factors, which is why the design and 3D printing of waterproof casings that are coupled to the design of the sensor nodes is carried out [22,23,25,27] or these in turn are introduced in housings whose degrees of protection are defined by standard IEC60529 [17,20,28,29]. It can be concluded that all the works put a special emphasis in the development of the protection systems, to guarantee the optimal performance of its components conserving them within the specified characteristics for long periods of time.…”

A Survey on Long-Range Wide-Area Network Technology Optimizations

“…The growth of the emerging IoT technology has dramatically changed society worldwide through a disruptive technology ecosystem in new sets of application verticals [1]. In this context, IoT has been receiving increasing attention from academia and industry due to its potential use in a wide range of application domains, including smart agriculture [2], smart cities [3,4,5], smart object recommendation [6], smart traffic [7,8], healthcare [9,10], and others. Recent forecasts estimate that 4.1 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet by 2024 [11,12].…”

Sensors-based mobile robot for harsh environments: functionalities, energy consumption analysis and characterization

“…Photovoltaic (PV) systems are becoming an important support in many applications; for instance, in agriculture they are used to monitor environment and soil parameters [8], predict floods [9] and optimise irrigation cycles and crop growth [10], [11]. Moreover, PV systems are useful for robotic vehicle applications.…”