AeroAlarm – alarming system in aeroponic farming – Attract

The project · from brief to prototype

What happened, step by step.

01

Challenge

Aeroponic farms grow plants in air and spray water and nutrients onto the roots. They yield more with far less water, but the system is fragile, the roots are hard to observe and fixing issues needs expert knowledge.

02

What the team learned

Plants in aeroponic systems start to die within minutes when something goes wrong, so farmers must react fast, often without the expertise to identify the cause.

03

What they built

An IoT concept with an imaging module, a cloud platform and a farmer app. Cameras capture root images; the app sends urgent alerts with time to react, a map to the affected module, a checklist, treatment suggestions and access to experts.

04

Impact

For Attract, a meaningful use case for its iAll technology based on liquid crystals. Faster reactions would raise yield reliability and make aeroponics more viable in cities.

Full project text

The team’s original texts from the project page.

Alarming system in Aeroponic plant growing system that mitigates risk of plant loss and minimizes effort to acquire quick and accurate knowledge of issues - ensuring safe growing in new tech-based food production solution.

This is part of ATTRACT which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA 101004462)

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The European Commission’s support does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which only reflects the views of the author. The Commission is not responsible for any use of the information therein.”

Challenge

Aeroponic farming is growing plants in the air without soil - the nutrition and water are sprayed straight to the roots. The aeroponic farm provides 9 times more yield with 90% less water compared to the traditional way, but the aeroponic system is very fragile and this creates issues with its usage. Also, the roots are in dark and moist space which makes it challenging for the user to monitor them and correct reaction requires expert knowledge. So, how to help the aeroponic farmer react effectively when the crops are at risk in the aeroponic potato farm through alarms and action recommendations?

Solution

To help the user with the problems we designed the AeroAlarm IoT system concept. It gathers data from the aeroponic plant root space in real-time and transforms the special data into understandable insights to be reacted and acted on to mitigate the fragility of the system. The system includes an imaging module, an IoT platform, and an app. The user value comes from the app as it helps to understand the urgency of the issue, issue’s location, suggests the cause and treatment, and makes it possible to find additional support from experts.

Impact

By improvement of monitoring, diagnosis, treatment of plants in aeroponic system it shortens radically the time user now puts into the same actions to define issue and correct treatment. This results in increase of yield, reduction in plant loss, and reduction of human and time resources for maintaining the aeroponic plantation. So, by making this farming technology itself more resilient and reliant, we improve the chance to implement it in urban areas.

For Attract this means meaningful use case for their arising iAll technology based on liquid crystals.

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