A Novel Approach to Single Tube Irrigation System with Adaptive Water Control

Water is a precious and limited resource for human, which signifies the importance for researches on effective water usage. In particular, researches on irrigated agriculture are vital as it is one of the major water-consuming sectors in the world. Nevertheless, traditional irrigation has several shortcomings in terms of water usage efficiency, namely the undistributed watering amount across fields which causes significant waste of water resources. In this paper, a novel approach toward improving the efficiency of single tube irrigation is introduced, particularly how it can be adaptively applied to different shaped fields to best utilize the water resource while increasing its water coverage. An irrigation prototype was built through an inventive combination of PID controller and raindrop sensors. Experiments have shown that this system will be significantly useful in areas where water is scarce, as it is 12% more efficient than the conventional approach.