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The necessity of saving water is a very important issue in precision agriculture. It requires soil moisture monitoring of very large field areas. Soil moisture maps obtained in real time are very useful for proper and economic irrigation.
The soil moisture sensor market is very large. Sensors differ in accuracy, price, measurement speed, etc. However, typical soil moisture sensors are designed for fixed installation or manual insertion. The aim of this work was to present sensors which have high accuracy, high speed of measurement and high mechanical strength required for field mapping performed by an automated platform, which makes hundreds or thousands measurements at a given field. In addition to the aforementioned properties, the sensors should have a big sensitivity zone, which would minimize the impact of air gaps, stones, roots and soil local heterogeneity on moisture measurement results. The presented results involve the design of the sensors and laboratory verification of their performance.
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