Irrigation Automation Using Infrared Temperature Sensors
Author: R. Troy Peters, Matthew D. Whiting
Published: 2006
Summary: The objectives of this research was to investigate an automatic irrigation scheduling system with a feedback and control loop using infrared temperature sensors on apple trees. At the same time we investigated the possibilities of using canopy temperature as sensed by the same sensor to automatically control irrigation for cooling. This preliminary study is taking place at the Washington State University Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser, WA on a small research block of Fuji apple trees. This first year will be spent purchasing equipment, setting up the experiment, testing hardware configurations and sensor positioning, writing software, testing correlations with the FST sensor and otherwise getting preliminary results. This experiment is planned such that it will lead into two additional years of tests in a commercial orchard on apple trees where the fully automatic experiment will be implemented to get comparative data over several seasons.
