Design and Development of Reliable and Automated Hydroponics System: Smart Farming

The success of Internet of Things solutions allowed the establishment of new applications such as smart hydroponic agriculture. One typical problem in such an application is the rapid degradation of the deployed sensors. Traditionally, this problem is resolved by frequent manual maintenance, which is considered to be ineffective and may harm the crops in the long run. The main purpose of this thesis was to propose a machine learning approach for automating the detection of sensor fault drifts. In addition, the solution’s operability was investigated in a cloud computing environment in terms of the response time. This thesis proposes a detection algorithm that utilizes NN in predicting sensor drifts from time-series data streams. The detection algorithm was later named; CNN, and NB, were designed to predict sensor drifts using forecasting and classification techniques. The algorithms were compared against each other in terms of relevant accuracy metrics for forecasting and classification. The operability of the solution was investigated by developing a web server that hosted the algorithm on an Thing Speak computing instance.