AN OVERVIEW OF CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR PRECISION IRRIGATION IN CROP PRODUCTION

Abstract

Water management has been considered as one of the central tasks of the agriculture sector for sustainable crop production. However, the conventional irrigation systems may cause a huge waste of water supply. Thus, it would be very significant to construct a variety of irrigation controllers to justify the water flow, water volume, time and position. Unfortunately, the understanding of the generation of irrigation control systems has been still lacking. The purpose of this review article was to comprehensively summarize the open and closed-loop irrigation control systems. Particularly, the operations, advantages and disadvantages of the irrigation control systems were comprehensively summarized, the parameters tightly associated with the atmosphere, crop, and soil were mentioned. Among them, closed-loop irrigation control systems, like linear control, intelligent control, and model predictive control were provided. Taken together, the understanding obtained from this review article could orientate the further establishment of precious irrigation control systems for valuable crop production.