Join Stony Brook University researchers and CubicAcres as they transform vast farms into vertical towers and push the boundaries of human-robot collaboration.
Stretching the end of a road and huddled in a corner sheltered by trees, stand a series of shipping containers, home to the world’s most advanced vertical farms. Inside them, machines buzz to circulate air and water, and artificial lights shine on, bringing life to curtains of plants rising above. The scent of salad leaves is fresh in the air.
A containerized vertical farm.
The array of white containers in East Setauket, New York, barely resembles a usual farm — it has no mud, no weeds, no egg-laying hens, and no guarding Boston Terriers. But according to Ryan McGann, Founder of CubicAcres, it holds the future of farming. He says, “A single containerized vertical farm can produce 20 to 30 times yield per acre.” He also says it only uses 20 times less water and requires zero pesticides, and that its set-up can be replicated almost anywhere.
There are a number of other benefits to this kind of farming — year-round production, protection from adverse weather, less risk of crop contamination, and increased sustainability. Containerized farming ensures hyperlocal food production — these mobile containers can be placed directly where the consumers are, which helps reduce transportation overheads and ensures longer shelf life and freshness of the produce.
Working in a vertical farm.
This farm on Long Island grows 4 types of leafy greens: Arugula, Lettuce, Kale, and Romaine, providing the best tasting, highest quality produce possible, in the space of a single city block. And every task — from seeding to watering to harvesting — has been automated.
“Our biggest challenge,” says Dasharadhan Mahalingam, a Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University, “was that the existing robotic technologies could not be used in these containerized vertical farms. Their layouts are drastically different from regular farms. The space between the rows is too small for a robot to even enter, much less work in.”
Space restrictions in a vertical farm.
When asked about existing technologies, Dasharadhan’s colleagues Aditya Patankar and Khiem Phi, say, “Latest attempts at automating containerized farming have only focused on live monitoring and inspection. But these technologies have been mainly developed for vertical farms in large spaces, like warehouses, and do not apply here.”
To get past this challenge, Dasharadhan, Aditya, and Khiem, along with Stony Brook Professors Nilanjan Chakraborty and IV Ramakrishnan collaborated with Ryan, Founder of CubicAcres, to push the boundaries of human-robot collaboration in agriculture.
In their project, titled ‘Containerized Vertical Farming Using Collaborate Robots,’ they managed to automate two very important farming tasks — transplanting (moving a plant to grow from one place to another) and harvesting.
The team used a single demonstration by a farmer to teach the robot so it could understand the motion constraints for these two tasks. And then, to improve it even further, they taught the machine to perform these actions in different variations of the same job. The result: A success rate of 84%.
Professor Nilanjan Chakraborty remarked at the progress, “It’s incredible how we could transplant saplings and harvest leafy greens using a collaborative bot, without programming to train it on every specific variation of the task.”
Professor I.V. Ramakrishnan, Professor and Associate Dean for Research at Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science, added, “The results of our experiment show that this technology can be improved even further. We believe that customizing the robot with different finger lengths and thicknesses, and optimizing its gripper’s dimensions for transplanting and harvesting is the future avenue of our research.”
The idea of containerized vertical farming is not new. It has been around since the early 2000s. However, the challenges of turning it into a viable, scalable method of food production have continued to test us. While this project is a step in the right direction, and it shows that machines can perform vertical farming tasks successfully, there is a lot more left to accomplish.
“Imagine the possibilities,” Dasharadhan smiles, “If we can take pressure off farming lands and turn them back into wild spaces, the world would be a much greener place.”
Communications Assistant
Ankita Nagpal