REVITALIZING TOMATO FARMING IN SOUTH TEXAS VIA AUTONOMOUS GROWING AND HARVESTING CELL

An autonomous bio-cell is a concept of a farming system that cultivates crops with minimum resources and human intervention. Advanced phenotyping modalities such as IoT, internet, and digital twin technologies revamped agriculture productivity to an extent hitherto unprecedented. However, matching crop cultivation and harvesting technology has yet to be further advanced to take full advantage of data-driven crop production. Compared to open fields, an autonomous biocell can be better arranged in spatial and structural allocation with expansion potentially suitable to greenhouses or buildings. This is a research project, and the major focus addressed are i) development and implementation of engineering technologies such as plant phenotyping, monitoring, and task performance, ii) integration of advanced computational and engineering methods, big data analytics for decision making, interpretation and communications of the agricultural systems data that enable more effective use of big data, and iii) engineering, sensing computation, modeling, and automation to develop crop production system capable of conducting certain crop cultivation tasks such as pollination, pruning, early removal of bad fruits, and autonomous harvesting. This proposal is submitted in response to a specific commodity board topic.