UC Irvine

Overview

The planet’s current population is around 7.53 billion and will only continue to grow. In

order to keep up with the increasing demand for food new and efficient farming methods must be developed. One of the larger limitations regular farming has is its current need for a large surface area, resource consumption, and labor. The Agrispire aims to maximize the amount of crop that can be produced per horizontal area by building an 18 story vertical farm on the University of Irvine Campus. 15 of these floors will together yield a minimum of 1500 tons of crop. The system will diminish the need for human labor by creating a completely autonomous farming system which will be controlled through a wireless sensor network. The network AI will collect data throughout the whole farming process into an NoSQL database. The data collected within the database will allow optimizing and controlling all mechanized functions such as watering, sowing, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting with a robot equipped with SmartShift. The building will retrieve its water from two primary sources such as the San Diego Creek and rain. The water will be filtered onsite with a simple and efficient filtration method comprising of coagulation, flocculation, sand filtration,and ozone disinfection. The facility is

cost-effective, environmentally conscious, and technologically controlled.

Goal

Our objective is to design an 18 story vertical autonomous farm with a water filtration

system, an autonomous crop farming mechanism, and utilization of AI to optimize the different structure. All the systems within the farm will be utilized to ensure an optimal growth and picking of a minimum of 3.6 million pounds per year of our target crop, strawberries, within the building.

Objectives

Create a system and web application to monitor a farm through sensors to collect data

and store it on a network where an AI will generate responses for optimal crop growth

and determine when specific crops are ripe.

Provide a water filtration system with the ability to purify water effectively in a

economical methods in order to support strawberries in an 15 story Green Skyscraper,

keeping in mind the pH and nutrient levels of the water.

Produce an autonomous crop farming mechanism that can be integrated both vertically

and horizontally designed to optimize the balance between cost, functionality,

performance, and practicality.

Design the structure of an 15 floor vertical farm with the purpose of minimizing

environmental impact, determining best material, and the structural design.

Green Wave Technologies:

In order to produce high-quality food and feed a growing world population, new methods of sustainable farming must be developed that are designed to increase yields and reduce ecological impact. Unlike traditional cultivation, vertical farming has the potential to reduce the need to create additional farmland and increase the productivity of a farm by a factor of 4 to 6 depending on the crop due to year-round productivity. Our goal will be to establish a robotic-centric approach to agriculture that takes advantage of modern engineering simulations, mathematics, the revolution in sensor technology, controlled environment agriculture, fertigation, and indoor farming techniques to transform modern food production. The spire will have an 18-floor, 256.5 x 114 ft farm located around the UC Irvine campus, and our goal is optimizing it to produce 15,000 tons of food annually.

Presented at the UCI Engineering Conference, February 16-18, 2019 at University of California Irvine.