Automated Food Production
Can a turnkey home automation system make a wider variety of nutritious food easier and less expensive for people to grow and eat?
Better Place Electronics began by investigating a low-cost home food-production system built around automation, mobile hardware, computer-controlled actuation, and machine vision.
Mobile Platform
A miniature hovercraft-style drone was explored as an inexpensive mobile platform that could eventually operate inside a controlled growing environment.
Control Interface
The consumer controller was opened and modified so that a Raspberry Pi could participate in controlling the platform programmatically.
Physical Testbed
The mobile platform was tested inside a simple container representing the kind of constrained physical environment an automated growing system might use.
Computer Vision
A computer-vision prototype demonstrated real-time object tracking.
Tracking worked, but the broader plant-recognition problem still required far more training data, reliability, and intelligence than the intended low-cost turnkey system could reasonably support at the time.
The physical platform was tractable. The larger limitation was perception: reliable plant recognition and environmental understanding remained too demanding for the inexpensive autonomous system being envisioned.
The project was paused pending advances in machine intelligence. At the same time, the investigation raised a more upstream economic question: could lowering the cost of energy create broader downstream benefits, including cheaper food?