ISHS Acta Horticulturae 534: International Conference and British-Israeli Workshop on Greenhouse Techniques towards the 3rd Millennium
AGRITRONICS: A DISTRIBUTED DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL NETWORK FOR AGRICULTURE ENVIRONMENTS |
| Authors: | R. Morais, J. Boaventura Cunha |
| Keywords: | Control systems, data acquisition, data communications, greenhouses, sensors |
| Abstract:
Improvement of crop quality and yields is a demand in modern greenhouse production systems. Also, production costs must be kept as low as possible to guarantee market competitiveness. The achievement of these goals implies the use of complex management and control systems to regulate, in an efficient way, a large amount of interactive physical variables. Recent developments in hardware and software tools, namely microprocessors and microcontrollers, lead to the integration of complex control and management tasks in agricultural exploitations. In this paper is presented a data acquisition and control network that was implemented with the aim of being applied to any agricultural environment. The network has three main operating levels. At the lower level, a set of remote microcontroller stations perform data acquisition and radio frequency transmission to a collecting and control station. The control station, which generates actuating signals, is linked to a higher-level network based on PC's. The management and supervision of the entire greenhouse system is performed at this level. Also, the results achieved with its application to the environmental control of a set of greenhouses located in the north of Portugal are described. The proposed architecture is now being installed in several commercial exploitations in order to evaluate its performance and introduce any improvements required by the growers. After this phase, the network will be available commercially through a joint venture between UTAD University and a Portuguese greenhouse constructor. | |
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