Developing a scalable and economic solution for real-time irrigation decision-making system for center pivots

Center pivot irrigation systems are the most widely used in the United States. Producersmake decisions for their center pivot systems including when and how much to irrigateprimarily based on experience and limited information such as coarse rainfallinformation/forecasts and field conditions. A cost-effective scalable timely and reliabledecision-making tool is urgently needed. This proposal aims to develop the prototype for such atool: a decision-support Cyber-Physical System (CPS) to provide real-time monitoring andforecast 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 theUIUC lab led by Kaiyu Guan licensed exclusively by Aspiring Universe. While that technologyhas been validated in an experimental environment the research focus by Aspiring Universe forthis project is to develop real-time capability and test and validate the technologies in realproduction environments.The project will lead to a solution that ultimately will be available to growers throughweb interface. Unlike most existing irrigation management services it will not require groundsensors. Therefore it can be offered at a low cost facilitating wide-spread adoption in the rowcrop grower market. Additionally the technology has the potential to create long-term societalbenefits through improved sustainability of regional water resources.