A neuromorphic continuous soil monitoring system for precision irrigation

Sensory processing at the edge requires ultra-low power stand-alone computing technologies. This is particularly true for modern agriculture and precision irrigation systems which aim to optimize water usage by monitoring key environmental observables continuously using distributed efficient embedded processing elements. Neuromorphic processing systems are emerging as a promising technology for extreme edge-computing applications that need to run on resource-constrained hardware. As such, they are a very good candidate for implementing efficient water management systems based on data measured from soil and plants, across large fields. In this work, we present a fully energy-efficient neuromorphic irrigation control system that operates autonomously without any need for data transmission or remote processing. Leveraging the properties of a biologically realistic spiking neural network, our system performs computation, and decision-making locally. We validate this approach using real-world soil moisture data from apple and kiwi orchards applied to a mixed-signal neuromorphic processor, and show that the generated irrigation commands closely match those derived from conventional methods across different soil depths. Our results show that local neuromorphic inference can maintain decision accuracy, paving the way for autonomous, sustainable irrigation solutions at scale.