Wageningen University & Research is inviting computer scientists and horticultural experts to form multidisciplinary teams to both challenge themselves as well as the state of the art in human operated greenhouse production in order to make a large step towards the Autonomous Greenhouse.
The goal of the challenge is to produce a cherry tomato crop within 6 months at a high level of production and a high resource use efficiency. For that, selected teams will get the possibility to operate a greenhouse compartment at the greenhouse facilities of WUR in Bleiswijk, The Netherlands.
Teams need to achieve the goal by growing the crop remotely controlled, supported by measured values of greenhouse climate and crop development and also webcam footage. The teams will have to make choices with respect to the control settings in order to control the crop production and quality growth remotely. They can also add their own sensors/cameras to generate additional information.
Each team will be able to extract necessary data from the greenhouse compartment and couple it to their own ICT/models/machine learning algorithms in order to decide on the control settings for the next day/period. They will send the control settings back to the system (the greenhouse climate computer) in order to steer the actuators automatically or send instructions for crop handling in order to reach the goal. WUR will continuously measure performance criteria per compartment and share them with each team and the public.