Networked Control of Greenhouses

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The objective of this program is to develop the network control system technology infrastructure necessary for high-productivity greenhouses specialized to harsh environments.The intellectual merit of our proposed research is Global food production is coming under increased resource pressure due to urbanization, reduced fresh-water availability, population increase, and targeting agriculture for bio-fuels. Greenhouses offer a 6-20X productivity increase by creating controlled growing environments.The rapid convergence of sensing, computing and communication technologies on cost effective, low power, miniature devices is enabling a revolution in Networked Control Systems. These are distributed control/estimation systems with large numbers of sensors, actuators, and computing nodes that communicate over wire-line or ad hoc wireless networks.Networked control systems will enable the next generation of high-technology greenhouses. These will include wireless sensor networks for ubiquitous sensing, optimized control architectures for regulation of environmental variables, and distributed fault-detection algorithms.Broader Impact The societal impact of the project comes is in developing technological tools that can be used for cost-effective production of food in harsh environments through protected precision agriculture.The scientific impact of the project will stem from developing fundamental system-theoretic analysis and design methods for networked control systems across a class of application contexts. Layered architecture approach will be developed to navigate design tradeoffs such as computational resource allocation, communication protocol choice, and power/reliability compromises.The technological impact of the project is that it will enable the systematic, cost-effective design of network controlled greenhouses particularly suited for harsh environments. Specifically, control-oriented models suitable for generic greenhouses will be developed, algorithms for distributed fault detection and isolation will be investigated, and appropriate scalable distributed control architectures will be devised.The transformative aspect of this project is to develop the foundational network control infrastructure necessary to increase crop yield by environment control of high-volume production greenhouses.