Large mobile irrigation machines (LMIM’s) are rapidly being adopted and
are expected to represent 30% of irrigation applications systems by
2020. LMIM’s typically uniformly apply water over the entire field.
However, the crop water requirement may be non-uniform across the field
during irrigation as a result of spatially variable factors including
genetic variation, field topography, soil properties and plant health.
There is current research investigating the use of plant monitoring
sensors for real-time irrigation scheduling and the relationships
between infield spatial variability and irrigation.
This postgraduate research project contributes to the development of an adaptive irrigation control system through
the development of the decision support framework,
the evaluation of alternative control algorithms
the design/constructing of the controller hardware and software interface.
