Energy Efficiency Using IOTA Tangle for Greenhouse Agriculture

Abstract

Greenhouse farmers around the world face multiple challenges imposed by manual tasks and must deal with complex relationships among growth environment variables. Usually, tasks are accomplished with low efficiency and high uncertainty, which becomes evident when evaluating the impact introduced by adjustments to these variables. These challenges have led to the appearance of the precision agriculture industry, as farmers attempt to automate the agricultural and commercialization processes using solutions based on the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud Computing. Although these novel technological solutions seem to tackle some of the challenges, several concerns about centralization and data silos throughout the supply chain have arisen. Thus, we propose the Interplanetary Precision Agriculture (IPA) project as an alternative to an increasing demand for better technological solutions in the sustainable food supply, required by the long-term presence of humans in any given environment. The current project aims to improve the cultivation process on and off Earth, by implementing solutions based on the IoT, AI, and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). Hence, a “system of systems” is laid out. First, Magrito, a holonomic autonomous rover, is introduced to capture crop performance parameters (output variables). Second, Precision Habitat PRO, the environment controlling device, is deployed to capture growing parameters (input variables). Third, a commercial Bluetooth scale is added. Last, a Farm Management System is utilized to correlate the data captured by IoT devices with business logic. The resulting information is sent to the IOTA Tangle network to render it immutable and interoperable, at zero network processing fees with minimal energy consumption.