SBIR Phase I: Cultivation Assistant Platform

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to provide indoor farmers with data insights to reduce risks and improve efficient use of resources to grow nutrient dense food. The value proposition is a first-to-market, off-the-shelf smart water quality and atmospheric conditions monitoring platform to support controlled environment agriculture, currently a $4.6 billion market. The proposed on premise smart service will focus on precision agriculture controls and advance state of the art in agriculture technology using a modular approach to enable plugging in multiple sensors into a unified system to capture water and air quality data at routine intervals around the clock. The temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen measurements will be used to identify healthy conditions, display trend analyses, predict and diagnose imbalances, and provide alerts, alarms, and message notifications to guide coordination of efforts to regain system balance. The target markets are the fast-growing U.S. aquaponics and hydroponics industries. _x000D_ _x000D_ This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves development of an Internet of Things (IoT) platform service to overcome legacy issues slowing the digital transformation in indoor agriculture.Existing solutions do not provide an open platform approach addressing the handling of open data due to proprietary application interfaces and closed data schemas to fuse disparate dataset sources. The measured data will be fused (i.e., overlaid and triangulated) to monitor relationships between measured parameters.The scope of the project is to develop key features in preparation for field testing. The scientific approach will leverage inherently heterogenous and complex edge technologies. Data connectivity with third party vendor modular sensor arrays, microcontrollers, microservices, and actuators rely on many different operational technology communication standards — the proposal will overcome these challenges with hardware and software solutions that will integrate microservices within a container to enable application portability and simplify application deployment and orchestration. A standard open framework will be used to facilitate interoperable software applications and value add services utilizing industry standard protocols and message structure interfaces.This solution will enable third party module integration to connect into a unified, contained, store-and-forward platform involving open source and proprietary add-on modules to enable monitoring and analysis._x000D_ _x000D_ This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.