Communicating the Automatic Control Principles in Smart Agriculture Education: The Interactive Water Pump Example

The integration of new technologies in Industry 4.0 has modernised agriculture, fostering the concept of smart agriculture (Agriculture 4.0). Higher education institutions are incorporating digital technologies into agricultural curricula, equipping students in agriculture, agronomy, and engineering with essential skills. The implementation of targeted STEM activities has the potential to enhance the teaching of Agriculture 4.0 through the utilisation of practical applications that stimulate student interest, thereby facilitating more accessible and effective teaching. In this context, this study presents a system comprising retrofitted real-scale components that facilitate the understanding of digital technologies and automations in agriculture. The specific system utilises a typical centrifugal electric pump and a water tank and adds logic to it, so that its flow follows various user-defined setpoints, given and monitored via a smartphone application, despite the in-purpose disturbances invoked via intermediating valves. This setup aims for students to gain familiarity with concepts such as closed-loop systems and PID controllers. Going further, fertile ground is provided for experimentation on the efficiency of the PID controller via testing different algorithmic variants incorporating non-linear methods as well. Feedback collected from the participating students via a corresponding survey highlights the importance of integrating similar hands-on interdisciplinary activities into university curricula to foster engineering education.