Principal Investigator Richard Fletcher
As more people migrate to cities, and clean soil/water become more scarce, there is a need to explore alternative methods for locally producing food. While growing plants is deceivingly simple, and alternative methods have existed for decades, fully automated and reproducible production of food at the local scale has not yet been possible. Within the Smart Cities group at MIT, and CityFarm project, my research includes work on two main levels:
Agriculture Sensors --Develop low-power or self-powered sensors which are low-cost and can be scaled for use by communities for monitoring plant growth and conditions. Counpled with environmental controls, this forms a feedback loop for growing plants.
Network Architecture -- Work with farms that range in cost from $100 to $60,000, the most important aspect of our research is the development of a network architecture or API that lives in a virtual machine in the cloud, which we call "Open agriculture". We are developing server algorithms that process the large amounts of data from our sensors and then automatically control devices in our farm that control the lighting, nutrients, and environment.