As we look beyond Earth in our exploration of other planets, we will need to develop habitats that are as sustainable as possible, and that includes growing fruits and vegetables.
And that is just what Heather Hava, a NASA fellow has done, winning the $15,000 “Eat it!” Lemelson-MIT undergraduate prize, an award for the nation’s top collegiate inventors in food technology, for her robots.
Hava, along with other graduate students on her team at the University of Colorado were chosen to participate in NASA’s 2015 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge. Their project was “Deployable Greenhouse for Food Production.” This project was one of only five chosen by NASA in May 2014.
The robotic garden and AI
The first of Hava’s two robots is a smart pot called SPOT. It is a stand-alone soil-less, hydroponic pod that can grow strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and leafy vegetables, like kale and basil, inside its small chamber. Nutrient enriched water is cycled through the internal system, where it drops on the plant roots, allowing the plants to grow. Leftover water is collected in a reservoir.
The SPOT also monitors the plants as they are growing. This will allow astronauts to focus on other tasks. But gardening will require some human interaction. Hava says the astronauts will have to replace the water and harvest the crops. She says these crucial steps are actually therapeutic when someone is trapped in a confining space for long periods of time.
The SPOT’s sensors track a number of parameters for each plant. These include water temperature, pH level, and every step of the plant’s growth. It will also alert astronauts when the plants need more water. Because of its smaller size, the SPOT can be placed anywhere in a habitat where there is available space.
Fresh fruits and vegetables “is one of the biggest boosts of morale for astronauts,” Tech Insider quoted Hava as saying. “Now they get to watch the strawberry grow, see the it develop, turn from pink to red. There’s a psychological benefit through those visual cues. And at the end, you get the prize.”
Artificial intelligence in the AgQ monitors plant and human health
Hava’s second system is called AgQ, It is a software system that analyzes data from the SPOT. With its artificial intelligence, the system is constantly learning from itself and is able to make predictions using existing data that will tell the astronaut gardeners which fruit or vegetable is the ripest, which plant is in need of more water or how they can maximize crop yield.
Not only does AgQ keep track of the health of the plants in SPOTs, but it keeps track of the health of the astronauts. AgQ connects to a special suit that analyzes their nervous systems using sensors that pick up physiological information. This data is also relayed back to Earth.
Meet ROGR, the robotic gardener
Unlike HAL 9000 in 2001, A Space Odyssey, The artificial intelligence in ROGR won’t tell anyone, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The Remotely Operated Gardening Rover, called ROGR is a robot on wheels that was developed by Hava in collaboration with NASA scientists. It can take its orders from the SPOTS or be controlled by the astronauts.
ROGR can move around the spacecraft or habitat to monitor or harvest produce in the SPOTs. It has cameras that allow the astronauts to visually inspect the plants using its video feed, and it can also harvest the crops using a grasping arm unless the astronauts would rather enjoy doing that part of the work themselves. If tomatoes are needed for a salad, the system decides which specific plants have the ripest tomatoes and assigns the harvesting tasks to ROGR.
Hava plans on testing her robots at one of the Earth-based Mars research habitats, either in Antarctica or the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. In these habitats, researchers perform tasks under the same restricted conditions they would experience on Mars.
