SBIR-STTR Award

Center pivot irrigation systems are the most widely used in the United States. Producers make decisions for their center pivot systems including when and how much to irrigate primarily based on experience and limited information such as coarse rainfall information/forecasts and field conditions. A cost-effective scalable timely and reliable decision-making tool is urgently needed. This proposal aims to develop the prototype for such a tool: a decision-support Cyber-Physical System (CPS) to provide real-time monitoring and forecast for field-level crop irrigation (i.e. timing and amount of irrigation) based on the center- pivot systems that are ubiquitous in row crop irrigation operations. This ambitious goal will be achieved through a novel use of multi-source data fusion (i.e. satellite data weather station network and forecasts) and process-based modeling under a data- model fusion framework. The foundation of the R&D efforts is technology developed in the UIUC lab led by Kaiyu Guan licensed exclusively by Aspiring Universe. While that technology has been validated in an experimental environment the research focus by Aspiring Universe for this project is to develop real-time capability and test and validate the technologies in real production environments. The project will lead to a solution that ultimately will be available to growers through web interface. Unlike most existing irrigation management services it will not require ground sensors. Therefore it can be offered at a low cost facilitating wide-spread adoption in the row crop grower market. Additionally the technology has the potential to create long-term societal benefits through improved sustainability of regional water resources.