Apparatus for Continual Crop Supervision and Intervention in Hydroponic Vertical Farms

Project Basics

Project Sponsor: Vertical Farming at Berkeley 

Amount Awarded: $4,505

Grant Awarded: Fall 2024

Project Status: In Progress

Project Description

Modern agriculture is highly inefficient, with traditional growing methods wasting resources as compared to methods like hydroponics. While hydroponics significantly improves efficiency with yield and water usage, it can still be highly laborious. In the case of strawberries for example, many new roles emerge such as pollination, pruning, and continual supervision. This project aims to solve these restricting issues by integrating computer models to offload a significant chunk of work to robots -- thereby improving the proposition hydroponics can offer. VFB has already begun work on this project, validating the feasibility of learned algorithms and designing a robotic mobile base. Over the next few months, VFB will gather demo data to finetune their models to successfully manage cherry tomato plants. Finally, the team will build a vertical farm structure, integrate components, and begin cultivating crops, aiming to complete the project by May 2025.

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