Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 25-3 - 58

AgriStick: An IoT-Enabled
Agricultural Appliance to
Measure Growth of Jackfruit
Using 2-Axis JoyStick
Anirbit Sengupta, Anwesha Mukherjee, Abhijit Das, and Debashis De
I
n the field of agriculture, growth monitoring and measurement
are two important factors used specifically
to evaluate the influence of the environmental conditions
on productivity. The change of circumference of parts of
plants like their trunks, branches and fruits is one way to monitor
plant growth. In this paper, we developed an Internet of
Things (IoT)-based growth measurement and monitoring system
using a 2-Axis joystick. In the case study, we measured
the growth of Jackfruit which is a tropical fruit and widely
cultivated in tropical areas like India, Bangladesh, Thailand,
Brazil, and Malaysia. The developed appliance is referred to as
AgriStick. The IoT appliance utilizes a 16-bit ultra-low power
consuming microcontroller. We used RS485 protocol to make
our appliance work for long distance range. The sensor was
utilized for the purpose of monitoring the growth of horticulture
crops as well as natural ecosystem plants.
Measuring Agricultural Indicators
Real-time information collection and analysis are essential
in recent agricultural systems to properly use fertilizer,
pesticide, water, etc. The growth rate monitoring or growth
measurement is a significant attribute of the horticulture and
regular ecosystem. The crop growth depends on various factors
like environmental and physiological conditions and a
plant's genetic endowment. The growth monitoring is significant
for timely harvesting of crops for better yield, from the
economical perspective of the farmers. We generally use the
radius-wise growth of stems or tree branches as pointers of the
vigor of a plant, while the growth of fruit gives us an essential
functional factor in gardening production. Usually, in growth
measurement, strain gauges and Linear Variable Differential
Transformers (LVDT) are used [1]. Though the LVDT-based
systems are more expensive than the strain gauge-based systems,
the former provide information with better accuracy and
resolution.
The storage of growth-related information is also vital for
analysis. In [2], multispectral images were collected for higher
output phenotyping of tomato spot wither disease confrontation
among 20 peanut genotypes. For growth measurement of
58
tree parts and fruits, there are tools like dendrometers [3], [4].
Though they offer benefits such as temperature compensation
and fine resolution, there are few disadvantages such as
cost, large size, and additional support required for the sensors,
and recalibration of the sensor when moved from one
tree to another. The disadvantages led to the development of
an alternative sensor which is an optoelectronic sensor-based
measurement tool [5]. Practically, this appliance is cost-effective
and has proven as an alternative solution for growth
measurement. Our research is based on the development of an
IoT-based appliance that can perform the monitoring and measurement
in an adjusting manner for both remote places and
test areas using the Internet.
The authors in [6] have highlighted the use of IoT in smart
precision agriculture and farming. The researchers have proposed
in [7], an IoT device for monitoring fruit growth. In [8],
the authors have discussed the application of Radio Frequency
Identification sensing technology in environmental monitoring,
soil monitoring, plant growth monitoring, and harvest
quality monitoring. The use of IoT in growth monitoring has
several advantages, such as the surveillance is continuous
even in real-time, and the data fetched through the sensor node
can be stored in the cloud for future use. Growth monitoring
of crops is a significant area of research interest in the field of
smart agriculture. In [9], the authors have developed a system
to monitor the growth of apple plantations. In that work, the
authors have used a deep learning-based edge network, and
performed the remote estimation of apple size during the entire
growth period.
The existing growth measurement systems [1], [5] used the
mouse or sensor as the sensing unit, Bluetooth as the communication
protocol, and stored the collected data inside the SD
card. However, there are two major issues: Bluetooth provides
short-distance communication, and the SD card is not able to
contain a huge volume of data. To deal with these challenges,
a system is required that will be able to provide comparatively
long-distance communication, and can store high volume of
data for further analysis. In this paper, we propose an IoTbased
growth measurement system named as AgriStick, that
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
1094-6969/22/$25.00©2022IEEE
May 2022
Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 25-3

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