UW Facilities and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Water-Wise Green Landscapes of UW with Sensors and Satellites

During 2023-2024, an Industry capstone student team comprising three ECE majors and one CEE major, piloted an innovative sensor-based satellite irrigation tracking system for UW campus in collaboration with UW Facilities, Onsetcomp (sensor making company), and NSF-supported Center for Soil Technologies. The system, called sD.R.I.P.S-sense (go to http://www.uwirrigation.org), was the first of its kind to be piloted for a University campus in North America to lower its water and energy footprint to keep landscapes green and water-wise during the dry summers. This concept is also aligned to the grand challenge goal of Civil & Environmental Engineering "Creating a Resilient and Sustainable World." During 2024-2025, this student team will work to build on the 2023-2024 pilot, which was over a smaller area, leverage the lessons learned, assess past performance, accuracy/errors and scale it for the entire campus. This student team will also work to use past water data to understand the impact of such a sensor-based Satellite system for irrigation tracking for UW campus. The key tasks the 2024-2025 student team will work to achieve are: 1) Assess the 2023-2024 system, its performance, impact, quality based on the limited geographic domain around Rainier Vista. 2) Expand the sensor coverage to rest of UW campus by following the protocols established during the 2023-2024 campus pilot by the 2023-2024 capstone team. 3) Coordinate closely with UW Facilities and its community of gardeners and landscape managers to modify the current sDRIPS-sense system and make it more user-ready and decision making-friendly from 2025 summer onwards. This student team will refer to the UW news article on the 2023-2024 Industry capstone to know more about the big picture motivation of this capstone project (the why, where, what and how) - https://www.ce.washington.edu/news/article/2024-08-27/smarter-irrigation-greener-uw, as well as the 2023-2024 capstone report/presentations available on the Industry Capstone Program webpage: https://www.engr.washington.edu/industry/capstone. The sDRIPS-sense system this student team will work to create a campus-wide sensor-based satellite system for tracking irrigation for UW campus that is scalable, stable, has built-in redundancy, be able to work around campus wide structural obstacles and be mindful of, and works seamlessly with, landscape operations of UW Facilities.