Wireless Sensor Network Node-Based Locusts’ Protection for Agricultural Fields

Abstract

Recently, there has been a frequent invasion of locusts in agricultural fields. Though locusts do not harm humans directly, they devour leaves on trees, agricultural harvests fruits, vegetables, crops and other green vegetation. The swarms of locusts are attacking more than 25 districts covering more than 50,000 hectares of desert areas of western India. The present paper proposes a unique solution to prevent the locust attack in agricultural field. Locusts can eat twice their size, therefore, a swarm of locusts can cause wide spread damage to the crop. According to Wikipedia, very small swarm eat the amount, 1 Km², of food in one day that is sufficient for more than 34,000 people. The adult swarms or hopper bands travel long distances and devastate the several million hectares of crop. In the present paper, a wireless sensor network (WSN)-based unique solution to fight the plague of locusts is proposed. In the proposed technique, WSN nodes are deployed in vicinity of the agricultural field. The WSN nodes detect the arrival of adult swarm or hopper bands of locusts and send a signal to an actuator system in the field. The actuator in turn activates the sprinkler sprayer system that forces locusts to change their route. The proposed solution is very effective in terms of diverting the path of locust swarms.

Appendices

Appendix

1 Features of Acoustic Sensor

The features and characteristics of sensor module match the requirement of acoustic sensor for the present application. The acoustic sensor SKU: 321988 has the following features [12]:

• 1. Detectable sound signal size

• 2. Built-in filter–rectifier circuit, DC signal output

• 3. Good sensitivity, built-in amplifier circuit, adjustable gain

• 4. Voltage signal for sound intensity can be obtained by AD conversion

• 5. Analogue voltage signal output, signal amplitude VCC/2

• 6. Compatible for Arduino sensor interface.

2 Specifications of Acoustic Sensor

The specifications of Acoustic sensor are listed in table 1.

Table 1 Specification of Acoustic sensor [12]

3 Features of Smell Sensor

This sensor is sensitive to [13]:

• 1. CO ( ~1 to 1000 ppm).

• 2. Ammonia (~1 to 500 ppm).

• 3. Ethanol (~10 to 500 ppm).

• 4. H2 (~1 – 1000 ppm).

• 5. Methane / Propane / Iso-Butane (~1,000++ ppm).

4 Specifications of Smell Sensor

The specifications of smell sensor are listed in Table 2.

Table 2 Specification of smell sensor [13]

5 Features of Transceiver

This wireless transmitter and receiver pair operates at 315Mhz. They can easily fit into a breadboard and work well with microcontrollers to create a very simple wireless receiving frequency (MHz) data link. Since these are only transmitters, they will only work communicating data one way, you would need two pairs (of different frequencies) to act as a transmitter/receiver pair [14].

6 Specifications of Transceiver

The specifications of receiver module and transmitter module are listed in Tables 3 and 4, respectively.

Table 3 Specification of receiver module [14]

Table 4 Specification of receiver module [14]

7 Features of Processor Board

The board is controlled by the ESP8266 chip (a 32-Bit processor) and has a larger flash memory compared with an Arduino Uno. It consists of 11 digital I/O pins and 1 analogue (input) pin. The board can be connected using a Micro-B-type USB cable. The D1 R2 is a WiFi capable ESP8266EX-based development board in the form of the Arduino UNO board format. This board is compatible with the Arduino IDE and with NodeMCU.

On-Board Switching Power Supply:

• Input Voltage Range: 9 V to 12 V

• Output: 5 V at 1A Max

8 Specifications of the Processor Board

The specifications of processor board are listed in Table 5.

Table 5 Specification of processor board [15]