Abstract:

Agricultural smart sensors are among the key technologies of intelligent agriculture. This paper describes the concept, characteristics, and implementation methods of smart sensors and introduces the composition, development, and application of agricultural smart sensors. The agricultural smart sensors were classified into three categories, based on the type of information they detect: life information, environmental information, and quality and safety sensors. The life information smart sensors detect plant and animal life information, and the environmental information smart sensors detect information about water, soil, livestock and poultry, and meteorological events. Currently, the application of agricultural smart sensors in China faces several problems. These include a low degree of integration (modular implementation), a heavy reliance on imports for the core components of agricultural smart sensors (sensor components and microcontroller), a low degree of intelligence, and limited application scope. The root causes of these problems mainly lie in the lack of core controllers dedicated to agriculture, the lack of self-developed high-end agricultural sensors, and the lack of dedicated wireless communication network protocols and high-precision smart sensor algorithms. The paper proposes some feasible countermeasures, such as manufacturing China’s “agricultural core” and high-performance MEMS sensors, constructing special agricultural wireless networks, and developing high-performance smart algorithms. If implemented, these countermeasures will help promote the intelligent manufacturing of agricultural smart sensors in China. With the rapid development of smart agriculture, China’s smart manufacturing of agricultural smart sensors is crucial.

Key words: agricultural smart sensor, MEMS based sensor, intelligent algorithm, wireless communication, microcontroller, scientific data acquisition