Urban lawns monitoring in smart city environments

Abstract

The control of water usage for irrigation purposes is a key factor in order to achieve the sustainability in the agriculture. The irrigation of urban lawns supposes a high percentage in the urban water usage. The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) offers the possibility of monitoring the grass state in order to adjust the irrigation regime. In this paper, we propose an Arduino-based system with a camera set on a drone. The drone flies along the garden taking pictures of the grass. Those pictures are processed with a rule-based algorithm that classifies them according to the grass quality. Three different categories can be tagged to the picture, high coverage, low coverage or very low coverage. After designing our algorithm, twelve pictures are used to verify its correct operation. The results show a 100% hit rate. To analyse the suitability of using drones to perform this task, we carry out a comparative study for gardens with different size where the drone and other similar system mounted on a small autonomous vehicle have been used. The results show that, for gardens higher than 1,000 m2 the use of drone is needed due to the time consumed by the vehicle to cover the entire surface. Finally, the study concludes with a comparative regarding to the amount of information sent through the network.