An Intelligent Irrigation System with Voice Commands and Remote Monitoring of Field

Agriculture sector is the backbone of Indian economy. With the advent of electric motors, the burden of manual irrigation by farmers has mitigated a lot. But still frequent power cuts and voltage fluctuations have affected the proper irrigation of fields in many remote areas. There have been several innovative efforts to automate the irrigation of fields. This study proposed an automatic irrigation system based on voice commands from an illiterate farmer. A separate module for speech to text conversion is interfaced to the farmers mobile. The module uses the Hidden Markov Model for speech recognition and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or processor based system to store the texts. Besides this, the system also includes a wireless network based remote monitoring of the field’s temperature and moisture. The voltage monitoring unit informs the farmer about the power availability in the field. The control unit is based on the Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC) controller and relays connected to the various valves. Controller shuts off the motor if the measured values of temperature and moisture have reached the prefixed levels. The proposed system would reduce the hardships of the farmer and helps in efficient utilization of water in the fields.