Projects and Collaborations

The management of greenhouses represents a complex and dynamic task that requires high costs in terms of energy consumption and professional skills, and typically highly impacts on the environment. The sustainability of new generations of greenhouses calls for new integrated monitoring systems, which can continuously and quantitatively monitor different parameters of the plants and their environment, using smart algorithms to promptly identify health issues and adaptively actuate actions to optimize the plants' growth and prevent epidemics. This project aims to prototype a system to manage smart and autonomous greenhouses where a number of NIRS-based sensors, produced by Seletech Engineering srl, are deployed to precisely and continuously retrieve information from the greenhouse. The system will take advantage of AI-based models and cloud technology, and it is expected to bring greenhouses closer to sustainability, with a significant reduction of the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

Partners: University of Milano-Bicocca (Dept. Informatics, Systems and Communication), University of Padova (Dept. Information Engineering), Seletech Engineering srl.

Funding: Italian Operative National Program (PON) 2014-2020, "Research and Innovation - Green". 

Reference publications (see Publications section): [J9, J10, J11, C25, C27, C29, C30, C32, C33].