The SWAMP project recently published a paper in the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2019), reporting an early attempt to build a digital twin for smart agriculture. A Digital Twin for Smart Farming leverages the technologies developed by SWAMP and Smart Sensing projects by creating an initial digital environment to provide farmers with a better understanding of the resources and equipment in their farms.
This paper presents a digital twin in the agriculture domain by leveraging the technologies developed by Sensing Change and the Smart Water Management Platform projects. The Sensing Change project developed a soil probe, whereas the SWAMP project is currently developing an Internet of Things platform for water management in farms. This paper leverages the technologies developed by those projects by building an initial digital environment to create a cyber-physical-system (CPS) so farmers can better understand the state of their farms regarding the use of resources and equipment. We conclude that our system can gather data from the soil probe and display its information in a dashboard, enabling the further deployment of more soil probes and other monitoring and controlling devices to create a fully operating digital twin.
The system consists of a field-installed probe that collects information on air temperature and humidity (DHT22), ambient light (BH1750), geospatial position (Venus GPS), the ground temperature at 7 cm depth (DS18B20), and soil moisture at depths of 7cm, 28cm, 50cm and 72cm (CSMv1.2). Probe signals are sent to a Raspberry Pi-3 module using: I2C bus (CSM v1.2 and BH1750); GPIO (DHT22); serial bus (Venus GPS); and One-Wire bus (DS18B20). An ADS1115 module is also used for the CSMv1.2 A/D signal conversion
A first experiment indicates that the probe can send data to the cloud and that it is possible to show this data in a real-time dashboard. It is noticeable that there is an abnormal drop in air humidity and air temperature, which indicates a hardware and communication problem that should be further addressed.
