Design and Implementation of Smart Hydroponics Farming Using IoT-Based AI Controller with Mobile Application System

Hydroponics is the soil less agriculture farming, which consumes less water and other resources as compared to the traditional soil-based agriculture systems. However, monitoring of hydroponics farming is a challenging task due to the simultaneous supervising of numerous parameters, nutrition suggestion, and plant diagnosis system. But the recent technological developments are quite useful to solve these problems by adopting the artificial intelligence-based controlling algorithms in agriculture sector. Therefore, this article focuses on implementation of mobile application integrated artificial intelligence based smart hydroponics expert system, hereafter referred as AI-SHES with Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The proposed AI-SHES with IoT consists of three phases, where the first phase implements hardware environment equipped with real-time sensors such as NPK soil, sunlight, turbidity, pH, temperature, water level, and camera module which are controlled by Raspberry Pi processor. The second phase implements deep learning convolutional neural network (DLCNN) model for best nutrient level prediction and plant disease detection and classification. In third phase, farmers can monitor the sensor data and plant leaf disease status using an Android-based mobile application, which is connected over IoT environment. In this manner, the farmer can continuously track the status of his field using the mobile app. In addition, the proposed AI-SHES also develops the automated mode, which makes the complete environment in automatic control manner and takes the necessary actions in hydroponics field to increase the productivity. The obtained simulation results on disease detection and classification using proposed AI-SHES with IoT disclose superior performance in terms of accuracy, F-measure with 99.29%, and 99.23%, respectively.