Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Smart Agricultural Technology

journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/smart-agricultural-technology

Low Power IoT Electronics in Precision Irrigation

George Routis a, b, Ioanna Roussaki a, b, *
a
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
b
Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Agriculture is one of the drivers for societies and economies worldwide. There are several challenges to be
Internet of Things addressed in this sector, such as food security and climate change. Agriculture 4.0 and the Internet of Things
Precision Irrigation System (IoT) technology paradigms aim to address these challenges, allowing for sustainable usage of natural resources
Soil Moisture Sensors
and application of novel farming practices. This paper introduces an innovative smart IoT-based prototype
Humidity Sensors
Air Temperature Sensors
system that supports precision irrigation of crops and enables real-time exploitation of data for minimization of
UV radiation Sensors errors, as well as forecasting. It is based on microprocessors and a Single-Board Computer (SBC) for data logging
Zigbee using various sensors that monitor soil moisture, air humidity, air temperature and UV light. Farmers’ Intelligent
Arduino Actuation systems have full access to all relevant raw data, in order to choose when, where and how much to
Raspberry Pi irrigate. The respective precision irrigation prototype system has been evaluated over series of experiments and
Consumption meter the respective findings are presented in this paper.
RNN-LSTM
forecasting
Machine Learning

1. Introduction
Agriculture is one of the drivers for societies and economies world­
wide. There are several challenges to be addressed in this sector, such as
food security, sustainable usage of natural resources, climate change,
increasing food demand, control of the respective large environmental
footprint, loss of biodiversity, etc. Agriculture 4.01 and the Internet of
Things (IoT) technology paradigms aim to address these challenges,
allowing for better and more precise usage of all available resources and
application of novel farming practices with optimal results.
The Ambient Intelligence Laboratory of the National Technical
University of Athens, Greece, has been involved in several national and
international agriculture research projects investigating the usage and
efficiency of IoT technologies in all aspects of the agri-food value chain.
One of the main challenges is the reduction of water consumption in
agriculture, which is particularly important given that irrigation of
agricultural crops corresponds to about 70% of global water usage.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Na­
tions: “Agriculture faces complex challenges between now and 2050 to
satisfy an estimated population of nine billion. One certainty, however, is that
more water will be needed to produce the estimated 60% of extra food
needed…”2.
This paper introduces an innovative IoT-based smart irrigation pro­
totype system that supports precision irrigation of crops. It uses various
sensors, monitoring for example soil moisture, air humidity, air tem­
perature and UV light, based on microprocessors and a Single-Board
Computer (SBC) for data logging. The paper also presents the findings
from a series of experiments evaluating the respective precision irriga­
tion prototype system. The system allows a Long Short-Term Memory
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN-LSTM) to be fed with time-series in
order to forecast soil moisture, UV radiance, temperature and relative
humidity. This is then used by farmers for irrigation-related decision
support regarding when, where and how much to irrigate, promoting the
precision agriculture paradigm.
Thus, as one may easily observe, this paper does not only address the
low power management mechanism that will be present in following
paragraphs or sections, but also exploits the usage of Machine Learning
models in smart agriculture. To the best of the authors knowledge, the
usage of RNN-LSTM models for forecasting values related to agriculture
has not been investigated in the related literature, using the four

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: georgios.routis@cn.ntua.gr (G. Routis), ioanna.roussaki@cn.nta.gr (I. Roussaki).
1
“Agriculture 4.0: The Future of Farming Technology”, M. De Clercq, A. Vats, A. Biel, World Government Summit, February 2018
2
https://www.fao.org/water/en/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atech.2023.100310
Received 13 July 2023; Received in revised form 20 August 2023; Accepted 21 August 2023
Available online 22 August 2023
2772-3755/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
parameters selected by this paper, i.e., UV radiance, soil moisture, air
temperature and air humidity. In the rest of this paper, more descriptive
details are provided on how these parameters are exploited in order to
help the end user take precise informed decisions about when to irrigate
the specific plots of their farms, not relying on a generic typical broad­
casted weather forecasting service.
The authors have developed a series of prototypes for precision
irrigation and have carried out multiple experiments to evaluate their
performance, in a controlled laboratory environment. The requirements
and feedback from farmers using the prototypes led to significant im­
provements and upgrades to both software and hardware used, focusing
on optimal data exploitation and an infrastructure allowing Machine
Learning (ML) algorithms to run in real time. More specifically, during
the four year H2020 DEMETER3 project and adopting a multi-actor
approach from project start, the consortium closely collaborated with
thousands of farmers across Europe in order to collect valuable feedback
to guide the prototypes design and experiment formulation, including
the technical solutions presented in this paper.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the
related State of the Art and discusses various precision irrigation solu­
tions already available. Section 3 elaborates on the problem studied and
presents the proposed solution in detail. Section 4 focuses on the
experimental evaluation conducted, while it also provides valuable de­
tails for those interested on the prototypes built for the experiments
executed. The filters and machine learning models developed are pre­
sented in Section 5. Finally, in Section 6, conclusions are drawn and
future plans are exposed.
2. State of the Art
IoT enables the interconnection of devices that can exchange data
often exploiting cloud-based infrastructures. The data aggregated in IoT
environments can be used directly or after processing in order to support
various optimization decisions. Market penetration (“The global
Internet of Things (IoT) market”) was a great motive for making IoT
technology more user-friendly for non-experts. IoT demonstrates a huge
potential for improving the quality of life of people and optimizing
several processes and operations in multiple domains, such as health,
education, manufacturing, and agriculture. In particular, the adoption of
IoT technologies in agriculture, was one of the most critical factors that
led to the emergence and adoption of Agriculture 4.0.
There are several initiatives investigating aspects of smart farming,
such as IoT technology advantages, machine learning algorithm bene­
fits, energy consumption control, etc. Information about the most sig­
nificant and promising ones can be found in a number of thorough
literature review studies in the agriculture sector over the last few years
regarding the usage of IoT [1–4] and Artificial Intelligence ([5,6];
Akhter et al., 2022), two domains that jointly tackle the main re­
quirements and features of most farm irrigation challenges. This section
elaborates on the most interesting state-of-the-art approaches that
employ IoT and/or machine learning technologies to deliver precision
irrigation solutions aiming to reduce water and/or energy consumption,
without compromising the health of the crops.
In [7], the authors propose a simple smart irrigation system
controlled by the user via the usage of IoT technologies. It aims to inform
about current values of soil moisture using FC28 sensors, of crop tem­
perature (using LM35 sensors) and of pH (using L10530 sensors). All
aforementioned sensors are connected to Arduino. The developed so­
lution aims to minimise water logging across the farms. In case the
temperature is too high, the system uses drip irrigation or sprinklers in
order to cool down the sensitive crops. The pH sensor measures the
acidity of the field that may prevent crop growing if it is too high. The
system eventually informs the farmer of cases where such risks for the
3
https://h2020-demeter.eu/
2
Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
crops’ health and yield are detected.
In [8], the authors propose a system that exploits soil moisture
sensors and irrigation system controllers to reschedule planned irriga­
tions, based on specific soil wetness thresholds. The system also uses the
Arduino open-source electronic platform, programmed by the Arduino
IDE. If the soil moisture measurements are below the specified lower
threshold, the respective pump is activated so that irrigation kicks off,
while if these are above the specified upper threshold, imminent irri­
gations are postponed or cancelled.
In [9], a system is proposed that provides real-time irrigation-related
information, aiming to reduce costs and optimise the usage of resources.
It measures temperature and soil humidity, and assigns different
acceptable ranges for both these parameters for each crop and soil type.
When temperature or soil moisture exceed the acceptable ranges
applicable, the irrigation system is automatically enabled/disabled.
When the system detects dry soil or high soil temperature, it triggers the
respective water pump to start irrigating the respective location/plants.
The servo motor is used for controlling the pipe in order to equally
diffuse the water to the soil. The sensors (soil moisture, pH, soil tem­
perature) are connected to an Arduino MEGA 2560 board and they use
an android application to control the pump via GSM or Bluetooth. The
authors have optimised their system to scale as well as possible to large
farm land.
A low-power solution is presented in [10] that incorporates smart
wireless modules. The system is based on a 50-Watt solar panel (5Volt
Li-ion battery) and consists of an ESP8266 board, humidity and tem­
perature sensors for sensing the air temperature and humidity, and an
anemometer to measure air’s velocity. Data processing and analytics are
carried out using cloud resources, exploiting historical data to support
optimal decision-making regarding irrigation.
In [11], the researchers have built a system containing a Raspberry Pi
3 and NodeMCU Devkit, connected with a Hygrometer and a DHT-11,
for sensing humidity and temperature. The current system transfers
data to a database. A motor which brings water is enabled when mois­
ture value falls under a specific threshold. All data values are saved in
Firebase, to be used later for prediction.
The authors of [12] use a machine that incorporates soil moisture
sensor in order to determine the level of moisture and depict it to the
output. They use temperature and humidity sensors so that they could
measure the environmental conditions and post data in real-time. Also,
they include a pH sensor measuring how acidic the soil was, in order to
estimate the amount of pesticide they need to use. As far as the interface
is concerned, they use an application via which farmers (producers) and
end-users (consumers) can communicate, so the consumers can place an
order. A solar panel and battery with the related solar controller are
used, so there is no need for plugged type energy. All the previous
communicate with an Arduino, which collects the data from the sensors
and sends it to the cloud with appropriate timestamps. Their Machine
Learning (ML) approach is based on Google Inception v2 model.
An approach with clear ML focus and a touch of big data is presented
in [13], where the researchers have used an Arduino Uno Rev3 with
many sensors attached, such as: JXCT soil and pH sensor, soil temper­
ature and moisture sensor (SLHT1), a micronutrient sensor and EC, OC
and OM sensor. Via a ESP8266 WLAN interface the Arduino transmits
the data to the server. A Kafka cluster handles the data and sends them to
an ML server for training, further analysis and, identification having in
mind the levels of threshold classification.
Some approaches have focused especially on energy consumption
control, which is very important, as electricity is often not available in
the fields and all devices depend on batteries or solar/wind power
mostly. Interesting experiments are presented in [14], where the authors
compare energy consumption for IoT devices that use batteries in the
agriculture domain. They use telemetry via 3G/GPRS modems to gather
temperature, humidity and acoustic signals when illegal logging takes
place. LoRa modules are used on dairy farms. The graph showing the
GPRS modem reaching 200mA supports the statement that GPRS
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
modules are energy hungry.
In [15] the authors have built a low-power Agriculture IoT System
with LoRa for footprinting objects in open area storage. They analyze
how long the battery can provide energy, and more specifically mAh, via
the calculations and measurements, using LoRa modules for trans­
mitting and receiving data wirelessly. They support that although cur­
rent consumption on the sleep period is the smallest in relation to the
other periods, it can significantly affect battery life. They also state that
in order to have long lasting battery, LoRa modules should have batte­
ries with low self-discharge. Their measurements indicated that the
module CMWX1ZZABZ4 consumes 47 mA on SF7 (Pukrongta et. al.) and
128 mA on SF12 (Pukrongta et. al.) when sending and 21.5 mA when
receiving data, which gives us a mean current of (47+21.5)/2 = 34.25
mA (on SF7) and (128+21.5)/2 = 74.75 mA (on SF12).
In [16] the proposed architecture provides data gathering from many
sensors that monitor weather temperature, soil moisture, acidity of
ground, etc. Those data then undergo process and analysis. The authors
depict a table with IoT wireless modules with the related power con­
sumption per sensor. So, for Zigbee they give 100 mWatts, for LoRa
module they give 440 mWatts, for NB-IoT they give 550 mWatts, and for
5G module they give 400 mWatts. It is easily seen that Zigbee module is
the least power consuming solution among the 4 modules. Given that
Vsupply = 5 Volt, Zigbee needs I = P/V = (100 mA)/(5 Volt) = 20 mA
current, LoRa needs 88 mA current, NB-IoT demands 110 mA current,
and the 5G module needs 80 mA.
In [17] they made experiments on 2 different GSM modems. Via their
station they can sense air temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed
and direction, solar radiation and leaf wetness. In order to transmit data,
they use GL865-QUAD and SIMCOM’s SIM900 GSM/GPRS modules.
Their graphs show that current consumption reaches 150 mA when
sending data via SMS, whereas when sending data via GPRS, current
consumption reaches 140 mA.
In [18] the authors analyze the data gathering and the related energy
consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) used in Agriculture.
They show the disadvantages of WSNs and present comparative research
in implementing data processing via IoT. In one of their figures, they
depict the different modules and their related power consumption. The
numbers are very interesting - BLE5: 10 mWatts, Zigbee: 36.9 mW, LoRa:
100 mW, SigFox: 122 mW, classic BT: 215 mW, LTE: 300 mW, GPRS:
560 mW and WiFi: 835 mW. Although BLE seems to be better in power
consumption than the Zigbee module, in fact communication distance
for BLE is 10 meters, whereas communication distance for Zigbee is 100
meters, making it more appropriate for large scale systems.
In [19] the researchers have built an autonomous device, which is
powered by a solar panel and contains various sensors, in order to
monitor a horticulture environment in real-time. It is connected to a
mobile application via which the user can monitor data of the crops. The
following sensors are used: thermometer (DS18B20), humidity and
pressure sensor (BME280), CO2 and metal-oxide sensor (AMS CCS811),
FC28 resistive soil moisture sensor, and GL55 light sensor. The data are
sent via WiFi to a cloud API. The voltage is 5 Volt and the power con­
sumption is measured to 230 mA (average), while it can reach 260 mA
on peaks. The average power consumption can hence be calculated at P
= V * I = 5 * 230 = 1150mW and its maximum is P = 5 * 260 = 1300
mW.
In [20] the authors propose a very interesting hybrid low-power
wide-area mesh network for IoT applications in agriculture that de­
livers wide-area communications consuming low power. They used
LoRa modules to implement km-range communication via TDMA. On
their hardware, they connected soil moisture sensors, NAU7802 weight
4
https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Murata%20PDFs/CM
WX1ZZABZ_LoRa_Module.pdf
5
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/getting-started-with/9781491
900550/ch01.html
3
Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
sensors, HDC2010 temperature/humidity sensor. The main hardware
device is supplied by 5.5 Volt. As they show, the LoRa module they use
consumes 12.5 mA current for Rx and 72.5 mA for Tx, so a mean value of
(12.5 + 72.5)/2 = 42.5 mA.
In (Navarro-Hellín et al.), the researchers propose a DSS (Decision
Support System) for irrigation in agriculture that operates automati­
cally. The system calculates the needs for irrigation of plants in a weekly
basis of measurements related to the soil and various variables related to
the climate collected via nodes that operate autonomously and placed in
the field. This constructs a closed loop control mechanism to adjust the
DSS to local variations and forecasting errors. They propose two ML
models: the PLSR and ANFIS for reasoning their DSS. They ensure their
proposition on three different species of citrus trees placed in South-East
of Spain. They compare the performance of their model against human
experts’ decisions.
In (Kukar et al.), the authors propose the AgroDSS model, which
connects the gap between agricultural mechanisms and state-of-the-art
decision support methods. Their system targets realization into the
existing information systems related to farm management implement
analysis on data that farmers have provided and collect their outcomes.
Their model incorporates prediction capabilities that can explain, ac­
curate and evaluate. It also contains time-series clustering, decomposi­
tion. It can also identify changes in the structure.
3. Problem and Proposed Solution
Advanced modern IoT devices can be employed in the agriculture
sector to address several challenges regarding for example sustainabil­
ity, yield quality and quantity, cost effectiveness in the agricultural
production, etc. Smart irrigation systems have recently evolved, build­
ing upon IoT technologies and employing state-of-the-art sensors, ac­
tuators, processors, etc. to measure or infer various soil, weather or crop
parameters and support decisions regarding plant irrigation. The main
issue that needs to be addressed is the high consumption of irrigation
water. When a flat, context-unaware irrigation scheme is employed the
result is usually over- or under-irrigation of crops. By monitoring all
available variables in real time, we can achieve great precision, while
feeding data into appropriate Intelligent Actuation systems farmers can
predict future needs and plan accordingly.
Unfortunately, farms do not provide the best infrastructure for
deploying electronic devices and sensors. Tractors, power tools, roots,
irrigation, chemicals, even animals make it impossible or extremely
expensive for us to use cables. Wireless technologies are the obvious
choice, but power consumption is a critical factor. There is always a need
for low-power electronics, as batteries die, bad weather can block solar
panels, and similar problems exist for other power sources currently
available. The need for power brings progress, but we still need to rely
on tested technologies, especially for large scale systems.
Existing solutions like the ones described in the previous section are
generally not easily scalable. Most of the experiments are performed in
laboratory environments and the systems may operate well in small
scale, but their deployment in large scale demonstrates various diffi­
culties. Power is a main concern, as they need to be connected to battery
on a 24/7 basis, which can only be charged by a solar panel or other
similar sources. Countries that have clouds/rain 80% - 90% of the year
have a significant disadvantage and raised costs. Examining power and
current needs of various technologies we see that GPRS modems and
WiFi are unsuitable for our goals. LoRa and Xbee are suitable power-
wise, but only Zigbee offers a reasonable communication distance for
the needs of large farms, therefore it is the obvious choice.
Regarding CPU performance, Raspberry devices are very efficient,
but need to be cooled, as their CPUs become really hot when operating
continuously for a lot of hours. Raspberry includes 4core-CPU clocked at
1,5GHz, unlike Arduino UNO, which operates at 16MHz. We have
connected the following sensors to an Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 micro-
controller module, the heart of our system:
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 1. Raspberry Pi 4B on the left and Arduino IoT-based circuit with the sensors on the right.
• 2 x Capacitive Soil Moisture sensors
• 1 x DHT22 sensor that can measure air humidity and air temperature
• 1 x VEML6070 UV sensor for measuring the UV light falling to the
plant (UV radiation affects the growth of crops and is usually
important to monitor)
Capacitive soil moisture sensors can withstand corrosion that is the
problem of resistive soil temperature sensors. In addition to the basic
sensors used for the measurements, auxiliary sensors have been used for
a second reading and validation of the reliable operation of the system.
To lower the costs, the sensors used are usually very cheap and therefore
MTBF is sometimes not so good. In case the measurements of the same
metric diverge, extra values are combined to extract the final estimation.
More complicated techniques are used for larger scale problems caused
by various sensor problems.
A DHT22 sensor6 can measure the temperature on the leaves of a
plant, as well as the air humidity. This sensor consists of 2 parts, a
capacitive sensor for humidity and a thermistor. It contains a simple chip
that transforms the analog signal to digital, which transmits the data of
the temperature and humidity to its output. The sensor is interfaced with
the Arduino microcontroller through the digital input of the Arduino.
Another sensor employed is the VEML6070 UV sensor 7 that operates
on 3- or 5-Volt power or logic, and implements the I2C protocol to
communicate with the Arduino. The sensor operates on the UV spectrum
and transforms the UV light of the sun that falls on the plant into a
number, which indicates the quantity of UV light each time.
The previously described sensors are connected to the Arduino
MEGA 2560 R3 microcontroller board 8 that is built on the ATmega2560
core and carries 54 digital input or output pins, out of which 16 can work
as analog inputs and 4 as UART. The processor works on 16MHz, which
is rather low compared to other embedded microcontrollers nowadays,
but it is ideal for the needs of the IoT system developed. It includes 8KB
SRAM, 4KB EEPROM, 256KB flash memory. Each I/O can withstand
20mA of current. To communicate with the capacitive soil moisture
6 9
https://learn.adafruit.com/dht?view=all
7 10
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-veml6070-uv-light-sensor-breakout?
view=all
8
https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-mega-2560-rev3
4
Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
sensors 1 ADC (pin A0) from Arduino MEGA has been used, while digital
pin 2 has been used to communicate with the DHT22 air temperature/
humidity sensor and the I2C (pins 20: SDA and 21: SCL) interface to
communicate with the UV sensor. Finally, UART 3 has been used to
communicate with the Xbee Zigbee series S2, while both the sensor
network and the Arduino MEGA have been powered by a 5 Volt DC
adapter.
The data collected by the sensors connected to the Arduino is sent
wirelessly to a Raspberry Pi 4B SBC (Single Board Computer). The
wireless module used to enable this is the XBee Zigbee S2 2mW (ZigBee
Mesh) with range of communication up to 400ft (120m)9. Two of these
antennas have been used, one connected to the Arduino MEGA 2560 and
the other connected to the Raspberry Pi 4B. Xbee operates on 3.3 Volt
both logic and I/O pins, thus, in order for it to communicate with
Arduino, the SparkFun XBee Explorer Regulated has been used that
transforms 3.3 Volt to 5 Volt signals and vice versa. In order to enable
communication of the rest of the Xbee elements, SparkFun XBee Ex­
plorer USB has been used, connected via a simple USB cable to the
Raspberry Pi 4B.
Xbee Zigbee is produced by DIGI and is improved on the power
output and the data protocol of the Series2. It operates on 3,3 Volt and
consumes 40 - 41 mA, the radiation output is 2 mW and it is able to
transfer data at 250 kbps (max) which is more than enough for the
volume of data our system needs to send from the Arduino to the
Raspberry Pi. It is suitable for ranges up to 100 -120 meters at LOS (Line
of Sight), and uses a fixed wire antenna. It supports 6×10 DC input pins
and 8 digital I/O pins, 128-bit encryption, configuration over-the-air,
and AT/API commands 10.
Raspberry Pi 4B 11 is the latest version of the famous Raspberry Pi
range of computers. It incorporates Standard 40-pin GPIO header. One
of its 2 micro-HDMI ports has been used to connect an external monitor,
while a 128 GB microSD with the latest Raspbian OS has been flashed.
The module uses a 5Volt/3Amperes power supply with USB-C connector
and there is a fan to control the system’s temperature when operating
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10414
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10421
11
https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/product-briefs/200521+Raspberr
y+Pi+4+Product+Brief.pdf
G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 2. The circuit of the Arduino-based consumption measurement device.

board, which interconnects the related sensors to one another and to

Table 1
the supply cables, is also depicted.
Connections across the various system elements in the system of Fig. 2.
To address the need for planning ahead with regards to experiments
Element 1 Element 2 Element 3 and technology advancements, we decided to use RNN-LSTM, which has
INA 219 current sensor Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 become a mainstream neural network for forecasting in several domains,
DC-DC step-down 240Volt AC to 12 Volt DC including agriculture. RNN-LSTM depends on seasonality and can
converter adapter identify patterns so it can forecast efficiently, provided there is a suffi­
Wemos D1 WiFi module level shifter Arduino MEGA 2560
R3
ciently high population of measurements. RNN-LSTM algorithms
USB output 0-5 Volt in circuit supply perform exceptionally well in parameter forecasting and estimation in
RTC DS3234 Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 various domains including agriculture and environmental control
Ethernet shield Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 [21–24], demonstrating lower error than other ML algorithms,
providing solutions for long-range dependence in statistics. The usage of
RNN-LSTM networks for supporting precision irrigation is novel in smart
throughout the experiments carried out. Finally, a keyboard and a
irrigation challenges. Therefore, as indicated by the literature review
mouse have also been connected in order to handle it as a desktop PC
presented herewith and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are
and facilitate code development.
no state of the art research initiatives that focus on investigating Intel­
All the above-mentioned modules are depicted in Fig. 1. At the top
ligent Actuation aspects based on the usage of RNN-LSTM as means to
left side of the figure, one can see the Raspberry Pi connected with the
predict variables of the farm for each precision location of the respective
Xbee USB adapter via the USB cable. There is also the power supply for
plot segments. RNN-LSTM, which is an evolution of classical RNN net­
the Raspberry Pi. On the right side of the figure, the Arduino-based
works, can provide more accurate predictions than other ML models and
hardware can be seen with all the sensors (DHT22, UV sensor, soil
this is the reason this paper investigates their performance in the specific
moisture sensor), the wireless Xbee adapter, the Arduino micro-
domain. Our RNN-LSTM model has been implemented in python and
controller and the power bank that supports the device. The proto-

Fig. 3. IoT Arduino-based circuit (on the right) and power consumption measurement device (on the left).

5
G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 4. Relative Humidity (%) remains low during the day and increases through the night.

Fig. 5. Air temperature (oC) is in principle higher during the day and decreases during the night.

executed on Ubuntu, in order to forecast UV radiance, soil moisture,
temperature and relative humidity, so that the user can calculate how
much water is and will be required, aiming for precision irrigation and
reduction of water consumption. Various experiments have been con­
ducted with numerous configurations in terms of epochs, optimizer,
dropout, learning rate, etc.
4. Experimental evaluation
An IoT ecosystem was built in laboratory environment aiming to
assist users regarding optimal irrigation of plants. Вasil plants of the
Ocimum Minimum variety in pots have been used for the experiment, as
well as soil moisture, air humidity, air temperature and UV sensors. The
initial goal was the remote monitoring of environments parameters, i.e.
temperature, humidity, UV radiance and soil moisture. The respective
sensors have been configured so that more frequent measurements are
obtained right before and during irrigation, thus controlling the initia­
tion and completion of the process based on the upper and lower soil
moisture thresholds specified. Of course, data processing, Intelligent
Actuation and actuation were executed remotely.
To validate the proposed system before deployment in actual farms,
we conducted experiments in a laboratory environment, where we
measured air humidity, air and soil temperature, and UV radiation. As
mentioned earlier, the measured values were transmitted to the

6
G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 6. UV radiation. As expected, non-zero values are observed only during daylight, and sunnier days result in higher values.

Fig. 7. Indirect soil capacitance (A/D converter). The steep dives occur after irrigation.

Raspberry Pi 4B via Zigbee modules, and processed to enable irrigation
Intelligent Actuation. Moreover, current, voltage and power consump­
tion of the Arduino-based circuit were also monitored via a custom
consumption measurement device. This device enables measuring cur­
rent in milli Amperes, voltage in Volts and power consumption in milli
Watts. It can measure up to +3.2 Amperes at 5 Volts maximum and is
based on an INA219 module. The measurement device integrates an
industrial power supply of 12 Volts, 6 Amperes, 72 Watts, 2 DC-DC Step-
Down converters 5 Volts/5 Amperes, an Arduino MEGA 2560 R3,
Ethernet Shield for Ethernet connectivity, a Wi-Fi module for wireless
connectivity, a real-time Clock, an INA219 power consumption module,
an SD card, and a female USB plug. The consumption measurement
device is supplied by 240 Volt AC, the inner supply gets the AC voltage
and outputs 12 Volt DC voltage, while a DC-DC step down converter is
used to provide 5 Volts to the Arduino and the other electronics. This
device datalogs the power consumption of the load, is connected to the
USB female plug, and stores the data to the SD card, along with the date
and time indicated by the real-time clock DS3234. The format stored is:
11/12/22,3:27:43,5.14,869.90,4742.00, a common CSV format, indi­
cating the date and time, then the voltage in Volts (value 5.14 in the
example above), the current in mA (value 869.90 in the example above)
and finally the power in mWatts (value 4742.00 in the example above).
The measurements are stored on the SD card, but the data can be
accessed on real-time via USB connected directly to a PC/laptop,
Ethernet or Wi-Fi. The main processing unit is the Arduino MEGA 2560
R3. It communicates with INA 219 using the I2C protocol, while the Wi-

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G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 8. Flow chart of the Intelligent Actuation System (IAS) logic.
Fi module is connected to Arduino’s UART and the RTC DS3234 using
the SPI protocol. The related elements of the measurement device are
depicted in Fig. 2. In Table 1, one can see the connections of each
element (max 3 per row, to fit).
The Arduino used has been connected to an Xbee module, that
handles the wireless communication and exchange of data collected by
the sensors. The Raspberry Pi 4B was remotely positioned and used an
Xbee module operating as a receiver to collect the respective sensor
measurements and store them in .csv format. The raw data collected
were displayed on a TFT monitor in real-time and have subsequently
been processed for Intelligent Actuation purposes.
The IoT ecosystem depicted in Fig. 3 was built, where the sensors are
connected to Arduino and attached to the plant itself for measuring
temperature, air humidity and soil moisture, whereas the UV sensor is
placed in the breadboard next to the plant pot.
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Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
A series of experiments was executed to identify the optimal triggers/
thresholds to initiate/stop irrigation. The experiments were carried out
from 03-12-2022 until 17-12-2022, lasting about 2 weeks, while the
deployed sensors measured the respective conditions every one minute.
Figs. 4 and 5 below illustrate the results obtained.
The operation of the soil capacitance sensor is quite straightforward.
The sensor produces an output voltage inversely proportional to the soil
moisture. Fig. 7 presents the A/D converter’s raw values throughout the
experiment. Right before irrigation, this metric reaches values up to 360
– 390, which drop quickly to 280 – 300 when the plant is irrigated. The
values 360 – 390 and 280 – 300 are raw values, coming from the A/D
converter of the Arduino. They do not have units. The experiments led to
the conclusion that the plant should be irrigated when the A/D con­
verter’s values exceed thresholds of 300-320. The irrigation Intelligent
Actuation process considers not only the A/D converter’s raw values
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 9. Power consumption of the end device (in mW), using sampling period of 1 hour.
Fig. 10. Power consumption of the end device (in mW), using sampling period of 1 minute.
(soil moisture), but also the air temperature and air humidity, as well as
the UV radiance. The values depicted in Fig. 6 are raw values. According
to the datasheet12 a conversion of those values is as following: 5 raw
values equal to 1 μW/cm2. Throughout the experiments, the current
consumption measured was about 166 - 186 mA at 5.1 Volt, leading to
power consumption in the range 850 mW - 950 mW.
The UML diagram of the Intelligent Actuation System (IAS) rationale
is depicted below, in Fig. 8. The micro-controller (Arduino) polls the
sensors continuously by checking if the threshold set for each sensor is
exceeded, if yes, then the system irrigates the basil with 250 ml of water.
The IDC (Irrigation Delay Counter) is set to 72, which stands for 72
hours. A loop decreases the number 72 by 1 every hour. When the
counter reaches 0, the micro-controller starts polling the sensors again,
12
https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/2899/C4170_veml6070.pdf
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Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
etc. The idea is to irrigate the plant every 72 hours if the sensors meet the
certain thresholds. The system is built in such a way that it is impossible
for all 4 sensors to trigger the system at the same time. Therefore, if any
of the sensor readings is beyond the specified acceptable threshold
value, then irrigation will be triggered irrespective of the other sensor
readings. Once irrigation is triggered, the system waits for 72 hours
before checking the four sensor readings. On the other hand, if all sensor
readings lie within the acceptable values, the system will rotationally
check the sensors measurements until it obtains a sensor reading beyond
the specified acceptable threshold value, in which case irrigation will be
triggered and no sensor polls will be made for the next 72 hours.
Finally, additional experiments have been carried out to study the
power consumption of the proposed solution. More specifically, the
same infrastructure has been used for the same irrigation use-case where
the power consumption of the end device has been recorded. The end
device consisted of the soil moisture sensor, the temperature and
G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

and P, the energy calculation in Joule is straight forward.

Fig. 11. This is the signal (message) that the Arduino sends via the Xbee Zig­
bee, using UART connection, wirelessly to the Raspberry Pi that data logs the
messages of the sensors. Given that TX/RX current of Xbee S2 is about 40mA131
and the VCC = 5 Volt, the power consumption is 0.2 Watt or 200mW on every
peak of the depicted signal.
humidity sensor and the UV sensor. It was also connected the Arduino
MEGA 2560 R3 and the Xbee Zigbee module for transmitting the data to
the Raspberry Pi. The supply (5 Volt DC) was realized via the power
measurement device which was connected to a laptop. The respective
experiments have been carried out for one week, over which the power
consumption has been data-logged to a laptop via its USB port. The
outputs of these experiments are presented below. More specifically,
Fig. 9 depicts the power consumption as recorded every 1 hour, while
Fig. 10 illustrates the power consumption as recorded every 1 minute,
therefore leading to a denser diagram. The power consumption ranges
from 820 mW to 960 mW. It is noticeable that there are several intense
minima. This can be attributed to momentary generation and commu­
nication of messages carrying less information. This leads to smaller
messages, and therefore to less power consumed by Xbee Zigbee to
transmit data. That is observed during selected night measurements
where messages often capture limited information.
To carry out the aforementioned experiments, an oscilloscope over
Xbee Zigbee has been used in order to measure the power consumption
corresponding to the wireless transmission and reception of messages
via the Zigbees. To realize that, the oscilloscope was connected to the
operating Xbee, enabling the capturing of messages send from the
Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 to the Zigbee module via the UART3 port. In
Fig. 11, one such message is depicted as this has been recorded by the
oscilloscope, where Ts = 2 ms/DIV and V = 5 Volts/DIV. It is thus
obvious that the message in every peak consumes P = 5 * 40 mA =
200mW power approximately. To estimate the respective energy con­
sumption, one needs to take into account the duty cycle, so given the Ts
In order to research the energy consumption on different wireless
and radio modules the authors have carried out series of measurements
over the individual elements used. In this respect, 10 different schemes
have been tested, which vary in terms of hardware elements used and
are depicted in Table 2 below. The same sensors are used on both 10
schemes. More specifically, the same sensors have been used across all
schemes, while different wireless modules and/or main processing
modules have been used per scheme. Therefore, for Scheme 1, two soil
moisture sensors are used, each draining 4.8mA current while operating,
one DHT22 sensor for sensing humidity and temperature, one
VEML6070 UV sensor for sensing UV light, one Arduino MEGA 2560 R3
as the main computing module and one Xbee Zigbee S2 adapter for
transmitting and receiving messages. Scheme 1 consumes 164.3 mA
current overall. Scheme 2 deploys the same modules as Scheme 1, using
SIM900 GPRS instead of the Xbee Zigbee modules that leads to overall
433.30 mA current drainage. Scheme 3 exploits the same sensors as
Scheme 1, using SIM7600E 4G module instead of the Xbee Zigbee
module, and consumes 747.3 mA overall. It can be easily observed that
GPRS and 4G modules need a lot of current. Scheme 4, uses the same
modules as Scheme 1, replacing the Xbee Zigbee with LoRa radio
module at +13 dBm, and needs 174.3 mA overall. Scheme 5 uses the
same modules as Scheme 4, but with more powerful LoRa module as
+20dBm, and needs 275.3 mA overall, that is higher than the current for
Scheme 4, as expected. Scheme 6 uses the same modules as Scheme 1,
deploying Raspberry Pi 4B as the main processing unit, instead of
Arduino, and consumes 345.3 mA overall. As depicted in Table 2,
Raspberry Pi 4B operating independently without any fan and without
any sensor attached consumes 290 mA current, about 2.5 - 3 times more
than Arduino MEGA 2560 R3. Therefore, Schemes 6-10 lead to higher
power consumption than Schemes 1-5. Scheme 7 uses the same modules
as Scheme 6, but instead of the Xbee Zigbee it uses SIM900 GPRS for
sending the data, and needs 614.30 mA overall to operate. Scheme 8
uses the same modules as Scheme 7, but instead of SIM900 GPRS it uses
the SIM7600 4G modem at 20 Mbps, and requires 928.3 mA overall.
Scheme 9 uses the same modules as Scheme 8, but instead of the 4G
modem, it uses the LoRa Radio module at +13 dBm, and the entire
construction needs 355.3 mA current. Finally, Scheme 10 uses the same
modules as Scheme 9, but with more powerful LoRa module, at +20
dBm, and it needs 456.3 mA current overall in order to operate. It is
obvious that the Scheme 1, over which the rest of the experiments have
been executed, is the least power consuming setup, consuming only
821.5 mWatts, whereas the Scheme 8 is the highest consuming setup
with 4641.5 mWatts.
Comparing the implemented approach with the respective solutions
elaborated upon in Section 2, the following observations can be made.
The module used in (Akhter et al., 2022) consumes much more current

Table 2
Overview of different Schemes and their power consumption, measured in mWatts.
Operating current (mA)

Element Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme Scheme
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Soil moisture sensor 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8
DHT22 sensor 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.4
VEML6070 UV sensor 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3
Arduino MEGA2560 R3 (measured without 109 109 109 109 109
pins used)
Xbee Zigbee 41 41
SIM900 GPRS (EGSM 900) mean of (PCL=5) 310 310
SIM7600E 4G (20Mbps) 624 624
Adafruit RFM96W LoRa Radio (+13 dBm) 51 51
Adafruit RFM96W LoRa Radio (+20dBm) 152 152
Raspberry Pi 4B 290 290 290 290 290
TOTAL current consumption (mA) 164.3 433.30 747.3 174.3 275.3 345.3 614.3 928.3 355.3 456.3
VCC (Volts) 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
Power consumption (in mWatts) 821.5 2166.5 3736.5 871.5 1376.5 1726.5 3071.5 4641.5 1776.5 2281.5

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G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 12. A/D converter’s raw values (soil capacitance) filtered with Savitzky-Golay filtering to obtain a clearer view of the irrigation thresholds.

Fig. 13. UV radiance measurements (obtained every one minute, 20.000 measurements in total): original dataset depicted in red, predictions made on trained values
depicted in blue and predictions made on unseen values depicted in green. An RNN-LSTM model developed in python forecasts soil UV radiance.

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https://www.adafruit.com/product/968

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G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 14. Indirect soil capacitance measured in values read from the A/D converter (obtained every one minute, 20.000 measurements in total): original dataset
depicted in red, predictions made on trained values depicted in blue and predictions made on unseen values depicted in green. An RNN-LSTM model developed in
python forecasts soil resistance and then soil capacitance to support the irrigation decision.
than the Xbee Zigbee module proposed herewith. The GPRS they used to
consume 200 mA that is far more current-consuming than the Zigbee,
which consumes 41 mA. In [7], it is claimed that the least power
consuming devices are BLE and Zigbee. Although BLE is less power
consuming than Zigbee, it cannot reach more than 10 meters range,
which is the main reason why the approach proposed herewith did not
experiment at all with BLE, and resorted to Zigbee that can reach 100
meters range (at Line-of-Sight). In [8] IoT agriculture devices with
sensors are used, where the measurements are transmitted via WiFi to
the Cloud. Their power consumption lies between 1150mW and
1300mW, which is much higher than the power consumption of the
proposed solution, i.e., 821.5 mW. Finally, in [9] it is again confirmed
that the Zigbee modules lead to lower current consumption.
Based on the analysis above, it is confirmed that the solution pro­
posed by this paper in principle consumes much less power than related
state of the art approaches. The choice of Zigbee is a very low power
component that enables the transmission of data up to 100 meters,
which is suitable for the experiments. Other choices such as BLE is less
power consuming than Zigbee, but the trade-off is that it reaches up to
about 10 meters range) which is not suitable for the studied problem.
Also, the choice of low power sensors contributes to the overall power
consumption result. Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 is often used as the main
processing unit for IoT schemes because it is not an energy hungry, as is
the case for Raspberry Pi 4B, for instance. Arduino MEGA has a pro­
cessor clocked at 16 Mhz, 8-bit14. It is one of the simplest boards in the
market that is compatible with low-cost sensors and radio modules. It
14
https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/mega-256022
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Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
also offers more UARTs, so the UART1 was used for uploading the source
code on it, while the rest of I/O pins were connected to sensors, and the
UART3 was connected to Zigbee. There was no need to disassembly the
device in order to upload the source code and then to re-assemble it.
Raspberry Pi 4B is another mainstream IoT module that is more
advanced, but more energy hungry. Therefore, as elaborated above,
Scheme 1 is considered to be more suitable and the least power
consuming among all the 10 schemes. This is due to the low power
sensors, the low power Zigbee module and the low power main pro­
cessing module, Arduino MEGA 2560. Measurements of the different
radio modules and the Raspberry Pi, confirm this claim.
5. Machine Learning
One of the most important features is the aggregation of data from
multiple sources and the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) al­
gorithms for optimal planning and Intelligent Actuation in higher level.
To this end, our system is designed to provide communication with
cloud resources and send data where it is needed. To test the infra­
structure we built an RNN-LSTM Machine Learning model to forecast UV
radiance, soil moisture, relative humidity and temperature values. These
are then used to support the farmers’ decision-making process regarding
the optimal days to irrigate, aiming to minimize the water consumption
and waste. The entire construction is based on Zigbee wireless adapters
for exchanging data between the Arduino end device placed on basil
plant and the Raspberry Pi that data logs the sensors’ values. The novelty
of the proposed approach is due to the usage of the RNN-LSTM neural
networks that are minimally investigated to address smart irrigation
challenges, even though they perform exceptionally well in parameter
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 15. Prediction of relative humidity using the proposed solution across the experiments.
forecasting or estimation in several fields including agriculture and
environmental control [22,23]. Moreover, another advantage of the
proposed approach is the fact that it is lightweight, easy to set-up,
consumes minimal power, while the parameter values estimated or
forecasted are of quite high accuracy.
The digital filter discussed first herewith smooths and differentiates
the signal. Savitzky and Golay [25] use a p-degree polynomial for each
consecutive subset of 2m + 1 points, where p ≤ 2m. Given that 0-th
differentiation represents smoothing, and d-th ranging between 0 and p
(0 ≤ d ≤ p) existing at the midpoint of the initial data, it is extracted by
differentiating not the initial data, but the fitted polynomial. Next,
least-squares polynomial can be applied via the convolution in the data
at the input via the use of 2m + 1 digital filter. The coefficients of the
convolution can be acquired for all differentiation orders, all points in
data and all degrees of the polynomial, however not for even number of
data sets (only for odd number) [25].
In the conducted experiments, the authors applied Savitzky-Golay
filtering in soil moisture datasets, aiming to have clearer view of the
various irrigation-related thresholds to be used in the Arduino C++
code. As can be seen in Fig. 12, when humidity value exceeds 280 the
plant is in need of irrigation.
As already discussed, the proposed approach is based on an RNN-
LSTM model that has been implemented in python and can forecast
UV radiance, soil moisture, relative humidity and temperature. In
Figs. 13–16 the actual and the predicted data for training and testing
periods are depicted. With red color we depict the real measurements
(the initial dataset), with blue the predictions over the trained values
and with green the predictions on unseen data. We use a dataset of
20.000 measurements and 20 epochs for forecasting. We can use this
model in order to forecast when the soil moisture of the plant pot is such
so that we can irrigate it. The UV radiance, temperature and relative
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Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
humidity forecasting can be used auxiliary to our Intelligent Actuation
about when to irrigate in the future. We feed this model with dates as
time-series and can forecast when to irrigate. As it is obvious from the
unseen data prediction, the results are satisfying. As someone can easily
observe in the following diagrams, the time-series demonstrate a pattern
that can be easily identified by the RNN-LSTM algorithm and the fore­
casting is quite successful and accurate. Of course, the motivation for
this work is to forecast the environmental conditions and decide when to
irrigate, while not spending resources. The rationale of the Intelligent
Actuation mechanism implemented and the basics of the ML schemata
employed are depicted in Figs. 13–16.
In the remainder of this section, the environmental condition fore­
casts presented above are evaluated using several performance in­
dicators. Seven statistical metrics have been selected to evaluate how
accurately the built RNN-LSTM models perform. These are: Root Mean
Square Error (RMSE), Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error
(MAE), R-Squared (R2), Correlation Coefficient (CC), Relative Absolute
Error (RAE) and Root Relative Absolute Error (RRSE). More specifically,
RMSE is related to the standard deviation (SD) of the differences or
variations between measured and forecasted values. MSE is to RMSE,
but without the square root. MAE evaluates the absolute differences
between measured and predicted values throughout the test try. It does
not consider the sign of the values and estimates the errors of the pre­
diction series. R2 indicates how reliable is the regression model used in
order to simplify the changed variables. CC determines the accuracy of
the model, while replicating the experimental outputs. RAE divides the
overall absolute error with the overall absolute error of the essential
indicator. RRSE normalizes overall squared error via the division with
the overall square error of RSE.
The aforementioned indicators have been measured for both training
and testing periods of the RNN-LSTM model construction and the
G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 16. Temperature prediction using the proposed solution across the experiments.

RNN-LSTM model performs. Likewise, the CC metric ranges between

Table 3 0.95 and 1.00 for all sensor readings and over both periods, which in­
Performance metrics over sensor reading estimations for the training period. dicates close to linear correlation between the actual and estimated/
RMSE MSE MAE R2 CC RAE (%) RRSE (%) predicted values. The situation is similar for the R2 indicator, while RAE
Humidity 0.82 0.68 0.45 0.99 1.00 0.06 0.08
is about 0.07 in average for both periods across all conditions’ estima­
Soil_moisture 1.75 3.07 0.79 1.00 1.00 0.04 0.07 tions and RRSE is about 0.14 in average across the same estimations.
Temperature 0.16 0.02 0.06 1.00 1.00 0.03 0.07 Finally, both the RMSE and MSE are quite low for both periods over
UV radiance 3.68 13.55 0.24 0.91 0.95 0.04 0.31 Humidity, Soil moisture and Temperature metrics. Nevertheless,
regarding the UV radiation estimations, both these indicators are quite
high, especially over the testing period. This is due to the steep spikes
Table 4 observed over the UV radiation sensor readings.
Performance metrics over sensor reading estimations for the testing period. The authors have integrated loss function in their python code in
RMSE MSE MAE R2 CC RAE RRSE order to identify how well the Machine Learning model used in the
(%) (%) current paper, behaves. The RNN-LSTM model used ADAM optimizer at
Humidity 1.43 2.04 0.69 0.99 0.99 0.07 0.11 400 epochs, with 0.1 Dropout. Three different loss functions were used
Soil_moisture 3.09 9.57 1.98 0.99 1.00 0.08 0.11 and are depicted in Fig. 17, 18, 19, one for temperature sensor’s data,
Temperature 0.42 0.17 0.27 0.97 0.99 0.17 0.18 one for humidity sensor’s data and one for relative humidity’s data.
UV radiance 13.95 194.49 2.2 0.95 0.98 0.09 0.22
Validation loss is depicted with orange colour and train loss with blue.
As it is obvious the model proposed responds very well since the loss
respective results are presented in the two Tables above. More specif­ function in both train stage and validation stage is decreasing.
ically, Table 3 presents the performance metrics over sensor reading
estimations for the training period, namely for humidity, soil moisture, 6. Conclusions and Future Plans
temperature and UV radiance, while Table 4 provides the values of the
same metrics over the respective forecasted sensor measurements for the This paper presented the prototype implementation of a smart irri­
testing period. As one may easily observe that the errors over both the gation system that is built based on IoT technologies, i.e., Arduino
training and the testing period are not high in general. MAE metric is handling system management, various sensors, Xbee enabling commu­
minimal for most estimations, ranging from 0.04 (temperature MAE) to nication with the remote SBC (Raspberry Pi 4B). The performance re­
0.92 (soil moisture MAE) over the training period, while ranging from sults obtained are encouraging, especially given that the overall
0.06 (temperature MAE) to 2.2 (UV radiance MAE) over the testing prototype system development was straight forward and the real-time
period. Of course, the lower the MAE value is, the more accurately the observation of the obtained measurements, as well as their subsequent
processing required low resources, to enable end users being informed

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G. Routis and I. Roussaki Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310

Fig. 17. Relative Humidity Loss function for 400 epochs for validation and test variables.

Fig. 18. Soil Moisture Loss function for 400 epochs for validation and test variables.

15
G. Routis and I. Roussaki
Fig. 19. Temperature Loss function for 400 epochs for validation and test variables.
with compact status/condition evidence and irrigation-related recom­
mendations. Moreover, the irrigation mode has been proposed to enable
users configure the desired sensing frequency, depending on the crop
water stress vulnerability. An RNN-LSTM Machine Learning model is
proposed that forecasts weather conditions (UV radiance, temperature,
relative humidity) and soil moisture to assist the irrigation-related de­
cision-making process. Overall, the main added value of the work pre­
sented in this paper is that the proposed approach is lightweight, easy to
set-up and configure, demonstrates low power consumption, while the
accuracy of the estimated or forecasted values is quite high. The authors
have started to make designs and efforts to scale-up the implemented
prototype deploying replicas of the presented solution in maize farms in
Northern Greece. This is ongoing work, where the authors are currently
pursuing the development of an AI-enabled Intelligent Actuation
application that considers not only real type farm data obtained by the
presented prototype, but also additional imagery data obtained via
drones, as well as forecasted weather information and historical data on
crop irrigations and respective obtained results. The common denomi­
nator in this research is the reduction of water consumption, while
pursuing full preservation of the plants’ health.
Furthermore, the authors plan to integrate satellite and UAV images
inputs that will be processed via RNN-LSTM algorithms aiming to
deliver higher quality irrigation related forecasts and estimations, thus
being more precise with regards to the water needs of the plants.
Moreover, the authors plan to make their prototype waterproof, which
will be an asset as none of the related state of the art approaches claims
to demonstrate such a critical feature. Finally, the authors plan to up­
grade their prototype in order to make it self-sufficient energy-wise,
replacing the power bank with suitable mini solar panels.
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Smart Agricultural Technology 5 (2023) 100310
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgements
This research presented in this paper is partially based on work
carried out under the H2020 DEMETER project (Grant Agreement No
857202) that is funded by the European Commission under H2020-
EU.2.1.1 (DT-ICT-08-2019).
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