to communicate and be controlled by a smartphone. developed the PlantTalk with automatic lighting, water spray, etc. There are several other smart hydroponic farming research projects. For example, it served as our starting point for a prototype before designing and creating our GrowBot. Indeed, by creating an open architecture, a large international community was created around the OpenAg Personal Food Computer being used and deployed in academic research development and in schools. The aim was to create a system where users could generate, share, and reproduce so-called recipes of growth conditions, and that could be deployed and used in schools from elementary to high school levels. OpenAG developed the Personal Food Computer with a desktop size based on the Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino Mega 2560 to interface to sensors and actuators. The MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) projects launched the vision and interest among researchers and communities to create smart urban farming based on food computers that could automate food growth in the local vicinity of the consumer in any (e.g., urban or hostile) environmental condition. Our first iteration for the development of the GrowBots started with a prototype of the MIT Media Lab food computer before we went on to create the GrowBots. Programs with different parameter settings lead to different growth of the food plants in the GrowBot controlled with these programs. Thereby, students can perform experiments to develop a parameterization of the optimal growth setting for different natural plants. The GrowBot robotic system allows students to parameterize growth conditions for the natural plants in terms of temperature, humidity, day light cycle, wavelength of LED lights, nutrients, etc. The GrowBot is automated with sensors and actuators to become a robotic system for the control of the growth of plants growing in a water solution (hydroponics (With hydroponics, soil borne diseases and pests are avoided, less water for growing is needed, and, in some cases, hydroponics may result in faster growth rates and increased yields )). The environmental conditions are made fully controllable in a tabletop-sized robotic greenhouse called a GrowBot. It is the aim of the work presented here to develop an educational robotic system, which permit students hands-on experimentation with food plant growth through the programming of environmental conditions. Further, the pilot experimentation in school settings indicates that the comprehensive system design method results in a deployable system, which can become well adopted in the educational domain.ĭespite the user-friendliness of these educational robotic systems, it can often be challenging for teachers to apply the systems in the school curriculum beyond the technical domain, for instance when teaching about food, healthy eating, and biology. An experiment with nine GrowBots shows that the different parameters can be controlled, that this can control the growth of the food plants, and that control to make an environmental condition with blue light results in higher and larger plants than red light. The GrowBot system also allows the user to monitor the environmental conditions, such as CO 2 monitoring for photosynthesis understanding, on both the touch display and the remote web–interface. This allows school pupils to easily program the GrowBots to different growth conditions for the natural plants in terms of temperature, humidity, day light cycle, wavelength of LED light, nutrient rate, etc. Inspired by educational robotics, we developed user-friendly graphical programming of the GrowBots on several means: a touch display, a micro:bit, and a remote webserver interface. The GrowBot includes sensors for humidity, CO 2, temperature, water level, RGB camera images, and actuators to control the grow conditions, including full spectrum lights, IR lights, and UV lights, nutrients pump, water pump, air pump, air change pump, and fan. The GrowBot is a tabletop-sized greenhouse automated with sensors and actuators to become a robotic system for the control of plant’s growth. We present the GrowBot as an educational robotic system to facilitate hands-on experimentation with the control of environmental conditions for food plant growth.
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