Design and construction of an autonomous, industrial and user friendly laboratory for indoor controlled vertical farming

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) and vertical farming (VF) represent possible solutions to provide food for a growing population using fewer resources. However, research is still necessary to make this type of production affordable on an industrial scale. The price for the final consumer is not competitive with produce coming from traditional agriculture. The main operating cost is electricity, and it is necessary to research solutions to reduce energy consumption in such production. In the literature, it is possible to find experimental setups of CEA, but they are often based on hardware (controllers, sensors and actuators) that are not typically used in industrial applications. This work aims to design and implement a laboratory for indoor vertical farming with industrial standards. Hardware and software are chosen in order to mirror the setup that would be used in bigger production facilities. The setup is completely autonomous and allows visualisation and manual control of the main control parameters. The system will allow further research to optimize vertical farming. The paper aims to share information usefull to set up an industrial standard laboratory and promote knowledge sharing to create such systems that will allow faster development and problem-solving in indoor vertical farming.