Design and Implementation of an IoT-based Monitoring and Automated Control System for Indoor Hydroponic Vertical Farm

Abstract

Nowadays need to overcome the multi-manifestations of climate change, continued environmental degradation, pressing need of growing food demand, and freshwater scarcity. Day by day the amount of farming land is reducing on the other hand worldwide food demand increasing every day. There is concern that the existing agricultural system will not be able to meet the ascending food demand in the near future. Indoor hydroponics farming is a soilless cultivation technology that provides high-quality, healthy, fresh, poison-free food. With the help of this system, can meet this increasing food demand because the vertical farming system can produce 10 to 15 times more crops compared to the traditional farming system. The purpose of this project is to design and implement of automatic control and IoT-based monitoring system for an indoor hydroponic vertical farm. This system is able to control important environmental parameters that affect plant growth such as NPK ratio, pH, CO2, temperature, and so on, and also controls automatically the solution level, reserve water level, reserve nutrition, and light. There are used Ubidots cloud storage to store important parameter data using the Internet of Things (IoT) and also a visual representation of those data on Ubidots. This prototype was planting cherry tomatoes from seed. A user can easily access Ubidots to see the condition of hydroponic farms anywhere in the world.