Imre Vass’s research while affiliated with Research Institute for Animal Breeding and Nutrition, Hungary and other places

Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) have started to revolutionize traditional systems to be smart. Smart farming is an example of this process, that aims to respond to predictions and provisions of population growth by providing smart solutions in agriculture to improve productivity and reduce waste. Plant phenotyping is an important research field related to smart farming by providing means for complex monitoring of development and stress responses of plants. The current phenotyping platforms for greenhouses are very expensive limiting their widepread use. The recent advances in ICT technologies with the appearance of low cost sensors and computing solutions have led to affordable phenotyping solutions, which can be applied in standard greenhouse conditions. In this paper we propose a low cost plant phenotyping platform for small sized plants called the IoLT Smart Pot. It is capable of monitoring environmental parameters by sensors connected to a Raspberry Pi board of the smart pot. We developed an IoT-Cloud gateway for receiving, storing and visualizing the monitored environmental parameters sent by the pot devices. It is also able to perform image processing on the pictures of the plants to track plant growth. We have performed a detailed evaluation of our proposed platform by means of simulation, and exemplified real world utilization.

According to a recent Beecham Research report, food production have to be increased by 70 percent till 2050 to feed 9.6 billion global population predicted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Since Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) have already opened new ways for revolutionizing industrial processes, as a result these technologies could be important for the farming industry. Smart farming has the potential to improve productivity and reduce waste to transform agriculture. Plant phenotyping is an important research field that gained a high attention recently due to the need for complex monitoring of development and stress responses of plants. However, the current phenotyping platforms are very expensive, and used in large central infrastructures, which limits their widepread use. The newly emerging ICT technologies together with the availability of low cost sensors and computing solutions paved the way towards the development of affordable phenotyping solutions, which can be applied under standard greenhouse conditions. The Internet of Living Things (IoLT) project has been launched to integrate IoT technological research with applied research on specific, biological applications. In this paper we introduce our research results for developing a low cost plant phenotyping platform for small sized plants, which is one of our goals in this project. The proposed IoLT Smart Pot is capable of monitoring environmental parameters by sensors placed above the plants and into the pots. An IoT device based on a Raspberry Pi board is placed under a pot, and the sensors are connected to it. We have also developed a private IoT-Cloud gateway for receiving, storing, visualizing and downloading the monitored parameters sent by the IoT devices of the pots. We have performed the evaluation of our proposed platform both with simulated and real smart pots.