UNAM students win Autonomous Greenhouses competition

Students and academics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

, in cooperation with experts from the company Intel, have designed an artificial intelligence algorithm applied to the autonomous management of a greenhouse, in aspects such as climate, fertirrigation, and cultivation.

This technological development made them winners of the first place in the Autonomous Greenhouses Challenge international competition , which was held at the Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands .

The students and professors specialized in agronomic sciences of the National School of Higher Studies (ENES) , León Unit , and the experts of the division of Artificial Intelligence of the mentioned company, participated in this fair with the team called " Deep Greens ."

The competition was a 24-hour hackathon , involving 15 teams from countries such as Holland, China, Vietnam, India, Germany , among others, who received greenhouses with virtual crops of cucumber ( Cucumis sativus ), to evaluate the functioning of the algorithm in each of its variables.

Aarón Vélez Ramírez

, from the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory of the ENES , explained that the team participants were students Julia García González, Rosina Torres Ortega, and Uriel Pérez Guerrero , along with Intel engineers, Zach Dwiel, Anna Bethke, Alexei Bastidas, Chinni Krishna Kothapalli, and Mariano Phielipp .

The idea was to use artificial intelligence to control Dutch greenhouses, which are recognized worldwide for their high technology in terms of temperature control, lighting, opening of windows for ventilation, irrigation, and injection of carbon dioxide throughout the day and in all seasons of the year.

The challenge was to design an algorithm that would make all those decisions, explained Vélez Ramírez to the news agency of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) .

With this first place, the team "Deep Greens" will move on to the next stage of the Autonomous Greenhouses Challenge, where they will implement the operation of their algorithm in real greenhouses remotely.

The second stage will be carried out in the month of September in Holland . Each team will be given a greenhouse of approximately 100 square meters to plant an intensive crop of cucumbers; there they will place sensors, cameras, Internet connection, so that the care and monitoring can be done through a remote computer.

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