Inefficiencies and imprecise input control in agriculture have caused devastating consequences to ecosystems. Urban controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is a proposed approach to mitigate the impacts of cultivation, but precise control of inputs (i.e., nutrient, water, etc.) is limited by the ability to monitor dynamic conditions. Current mechanistic and physiological plant growth models (MPMs) have not yet been unified and have uncovered knowledge gaps of the complex interplay among control variables. Moreover, because of their specificity, MPMs are of limited utility when extended to additional plant species or environmental conditions. Simultaneously, although machine learning (ML) can uncover latent interactions across conditions, phenotyping bottlenecks have hindered successful application. To bridge these gaps, we propose an integrative approach whereby MPMs are used to construct the foundations of ML algorithms, reducing data requirements and costs, and ML is used to elucidate parameters and causal inference in MPM. This review highlights research about control and automation in CEA, synthesizing literature into a framework whereby ML, MPM, and biofeedback inform what we call dynamically controlled environment agriculture (DCEA). We highlight synergistic characteristics of MPM and ML to illustrate that a DCEA framework could contribute to urban resilience, human health, and optimized productivity and nutritional content.
We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, mediumthroughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is important to both farmers and researchers to detect anomalies and develop predictive models for plant growth. The availability of high-quality, off-the-shelf structurefrom-motion (SfM) and photogrammetry packages has enabled a vibrant community of roboticists to apply computer vision for non-destructive plant monitoring. While existing approaches tend to focus on either high-throughput (e.g. satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), vehicle-mounted, conveyor-belt imagery) or high-accuracy/robustness to occlusions (e.g. turn-table scanner or robot arm), we propose a middle-ground that achieves high accuracy with a medium-throughput, highly automated robot. Our design pairs the workspace scalability of a cabledriven parallel robot (CDPR) with the dexterity of a 4 degree-offreedom (DoF) robot arm to autonomously image many plants from a variety of viewpoints. We describe our robot design and demonstrate it experimentally by collecting daily photographs of 54 plants from 64 viewpoints each. We show that our approach can produce scientifically useful measurements, operate fully autonomously after initial calibration, and produce better reconstructions and plant property estimates than those of overcanopy methods (e.g. UAV). As example applications, we show that our system can successfully estimate plant mass with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.586g and, when used to perform hypothesis testing on the relationship between mass and age, produces p-values comparable to ground-truth data (p=0.0020 and p=0.0016, respectively).
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