This team conducts applied research to develop technologies that advance the capacities and economics of sustainable food production in Hawaiʻi, particularly through the use of controlled environment agriculture. Focal points include automated monitoring systems for plant growth, environmental conditions, and resource consumption, automation of planting and harvesting operations, and light, temperature, and humidity control. Applications may also extend beyond CEA to traditional farming and other areas such as a coconut rhinoceros beetle removal from compost and a coconut sorting system for food and fuel uses. This involves technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI), vision systems, robotics, and Internet of Things (IoT).
Goals:
Interact with food system stakeholders to identify problems and opportunities. From these interactions,the team will design, prototype, and deploy technological solutions that may use machine vision, AI, automated processes, robotics, controls, and economic analyses.
Key elements:
Image processing, machine vision, AI, robotics, heat transfer, light management, environmental controls, resource optimization, plant growth and development, techno-economic analysis.
Research issues:
We are currently working on automating multiple aspects of food systems including planting, harvesting, controlling environmental conditions, monitoring growth and development, and developing growth strategies. All projects are developed as IoT devices that are linked through a local network. Machine vision is used heavily to automate assessment of device performance and is currently being explored for quality assessment and as an advanced tool for predicting, monitoring, or diagnosing issues in plants which are not currently presenting known signs of distress.
Meeting time:
Mondays, 5 to 6 pm (subject to change)
Advisors:
Ryan Kurasaki, Molecular Biosciences & Bioengineering
Partners and sponsors:
College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience
Majors, preparation, interests:Students from any major interested in food production in Hawaii are welcome to participate. The skills or course work mentioned below are those which can be applied to this project, but a student does not need to have these skills to participate.
- Biological Engineering: Bioprocesses, programming, sensors, controls, AI
- Electrical Engineering: Circuits, controls, programming, AI
- Mechanical Engineering: Heat transfer, mechanics
- Civil and Environmental Engineering: Fluids, mechanics
- Computer Engineering: Programming, machine vision, AI
- Computer science: Programming, machine vision, AI, image processing
- Biological or plant sciences including NREM, PEPS, TPSS, TAE: Crop yield and management, resource usage
Contact information:
Ryan Kurasaki, rkurasak@hawaii.edu