Sustainable Sensing for Precision Agriculture and Urban Greening

The Challenge:

Despite substantial growth and optimism, and advances in modern sensor design, investing in new and better soil sensor products for Australian and global businesses remains out of reach.

This is due to constraints in connectivity, accuracy, durability, cost, maintenance, and battery dependency. In Australia these limitations are amplified by the harsh environmental and challenging operational conditions.

The Solution:

This project will address the following key constraints regarding sensor adoption:

• power consumption
• sensing methods and modes
• connectivity
• supporting data analytics aimed at improving both sensor performance and system optimisation.  

The initial focus will be on soil moisture and potassium; parameters relevant to mitigating climate change as it improves drought tolerance, and helps plants get through the hard winters.

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‍Outcomes:

• Reduce energy use of sensors
• Extend sensors ​lifetime (relative to market benchmark)
• Improve design to it can withstand wide ranging Australian conditions such as moisture, temperature.​
• Improve network reliability (throughput, delays, packet loss, up/down time, security)
• Increase connectivity (range)​
• Data accuracy, energy efficient data use/transfer (absolute values, more samples, less variations).​
• Automation (time to decision)

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