Master thesis : Redesigning the automation and intelligence platform for indoor growing systems

Abstract

Agricultural techniques have always evolved by embracing the industry changes that took part according to the human technological evolution. Nowadays, Industry 4.0 represents the fourth industrial revolution leading to Agriculture 4.0. This last evolution is mainly defined by the fusion of many emerging technologies such as the Internet of things, advanced electronics and robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence. The new Agriculture 4.0 ecosystem is thus characterized by real-time farm management, a high degree of automation, and data-driven intelligent decision-making. The emerging smart plant factory concept is the real world realization of this new agricultural paradigm. This work proposes a new automation and intelligence platform that is defined as a basic hardware pattern and software structure upon which information and communication systems that serve as a base for various services are built. This platform has the objective of accommodating most functions needed by these state of the art farms. More precisely, the main target is to organize the communications and roles of each implemented module. To do so, a proof of concept of the monitoring hardware and a minimum viable product of the control software are implemented. Moreover, this project was tested with real world cultivation experiments thanks to a custom made cultivation tray. By having a multisectoral approach and by studying the modularity of the systems, the conducted development were shown to improve upon the currently available solutions regarding the technical documentation, edge and cloud computing compatibility, and hardware and software flexibility.