Introduction
Agriculture often requires farmers to regularly monitor different areas of a field. Soil conditions can vary from one area to another, making continuous manual monitoring time-consuming.
To address this, I developed AgriScout, a low-cost smart agricultural monitoring rover designed to create a direct connection between the farmer and the field.
AgriScout is a 4WD mobile rover based on ESP32 that can be remotely controlled through a smartphone while collecting important field information such as soil moisture, temperature, humidity, and obstacle distance.
How It Works
The ESP32 acts as the main controller of the rover.
The rover communicates with a smartphone through Wi-Fi and Blynk IoT.
The user can:
- Move the rover Forward, Backward, Left, Right and Stop
- Adjust the rover speed
- Monitor soil moisture
- Monitor temperature and humidity
- Monitor obstacle distance
- Manually control the water pump
- Enable automatic watering
The basic concept is:
Farmer → Smartphone → Blynk → ESP32 → Rover
and
Rover → Sensors → ESP32 → Blynk → Farmer
This creates a two-way connection between the farmer and the field.
Soil Monitoring
A capacitive soil-moisture sensor is mounted on the rover.
The rover can be moved to different areas of a crop field and the soil condition can be checked at each location.
This makes the system mobile instead of depending on a sensor permanently installed at only one location.
Automatic Watering
AgriScout can also respond to the soil condition.
When automatic watering is enabled and the soil moisture falls below the selected threshold, the ESP32 activates a relay and switches on the water pump for a short period.
The system then stops the pump and checks the soil condition again.
Sense → Decide → Respond
Rover and Safety
The rover uses four geared DC motors controlled through an L298N motor driver.
An HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor measures the distance in front of the rover and can be used to help prevent collisions with obstacles.
Main Components
- ESP32 DevKit V1
- L298N Motor Driver
- 4 × Geared DC Motors
- Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor
- DHT11
- HC-SR04
- 5V Relay
- DC Water Pump
- 7.4V Battery
- LM2596 Buck Converter
- 4WD Rover Chassis
- Blynk IoT Platform
Future Possibilities
The AgriScout platform can be expanded in the future with:
- AI-based plant/crop monitoring
- Camera-based disease detection
- GPS-based field mapping
- Voice-controlled rover operation
- Long-range communication using LoRa
- Solar-powered charging
Conclusion
AgriScout is an attempt to build an affordable agricultural robot using easily available electronics.
Instead of simply automating a farming task, the project focuses on connecting the farmer with different parts of the field through a mobile sensing platform.
Sense. Connect. Respond. 
