What if Robots ♥ Nature?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
I'm Nico from Plants Machines, you will also get known to Basti and Martin, they will talk as well. We are a bunch of guys from Weimar who try to convince technology to love nature. Today we will tell you how we can bring nature and food production into our future
00:42
cities and how Roberts will help us with that. At the beginning of our talk, I have to tell you that bringing nature back into our cities isn't a brand new idea. There's a long history of vertical and urban farming concepts.
01:01
In 1890 already, Ebenezer Howard came up with the idea of the garden city. He wanted to restructure cities in a way that they would integrate into nature rather than consume it. In the 30s, Frank Lloyd Wright had an even more radical plan. His concept was that each family should own one acre of land for housing and growing
01:27
their own food. You can see it here in the middle of the slide. And Le Corbusier's concept from the 20s suggested to densify the city into high-rise and towers surrounded by green space.
01:41
So, there are a lot of concepts out there. But today the problem is a lot bigger. And nowadays cities are even bigger than during the time the concepts I showed you were made. Will be 10 billion people in 2050. Most of us will live in meager cities, especially in South America, in Asia.
02:06
And there will be not enough arable land for traditional agriculture while everyone from us wants to eat happy cows or meat from happy cows, happy fish and vegetables from organic farms.
02:24
Additionally, the climate change starts to impact our food production. I think the drought in California that you can see here on the right or left-hand side from my side, you can see it there that the climate change impacts our food production.
02:41
And when I say traditional agriculture, I mean industrial agriculture like we practice it today. And you can see it here in the middle how that looks like. So, if we just look at the problems and I only mentioned a few of our food security
03:00
problems, we could definitely say we are doomed, we fucked up, and we will starve if we just look at the problems. But of course, we are not fucked up. There are a lot of solutions out there. And we just want to talk about one of them today. And that's urban and vertical farming.
03:20
Vertical and urban farming experiences a huge hype over the past 10 years. And the industry is picking up now. Dixon Despommier, a professor of the Columbia University, is the father of this concept. The idea is to produce food in tall buildings and unused areas like rooftops and old factory
03:41
buildings within the city. There are numbers of examples out there that show how it could work. For example, the ECF farm from ECF Farm Systems here in Berlin. It's an aquaponics farm. The huge greenhouses from farm here in Chicago or the sky green vertical farm in Singapore
04:03
that soon will produce two tons of vegetables per day. You can see that the growing beds, you can see it here on the pictures, on the left-hand side is farmed here, the farm in Chicago. And on the right-hand side, it's green sky farms in Singapore. You can see that the growing beds are stacked over each other and are illuminated with
04:26
extra LED light. That's why we call it vertical farming. The most of these farms work with growing methods like hydroponic and aquaponic,
04:42
which are both soil-free methods. That means the crops grow in grow beds, plastic grow beds, where the roots are watered with the exact nutrient dosage they need. Hydroponic needs external nutrients to be added. In case of aquaponics, we combine growing plants with fish farming.
05:04
The dirty water of the fish allows the farmer to grow plants without using extra fertilizer. At the end, we have a double outcome. Fish and fresh vegetables like lettuce, tomatoes, or herbs, and they are all
05:21
organic. It's an ecosystem like nature. Different organisms help each other to grow. These pictures here are from an urban farm, from urban organics, and they are from Minneapolis in the USA, so they use aquaponics to grow food.
05:43
To have the perfect growing environment for plants and fish within the city, we have to control the environmental conditions. Especially fish are real sensitive organisms who need a lot of care. And if you look on a meager city out of stones, glass, and steel, you will
06:04
recognize very fast that meager cities aren't an area where plants want to grow. That's why we have to provide the right growing environment. In vertical and urban farms, we are able to control temperature, humidity, the
06:21
light spectrum, CO2, and the nutrient supply or the pH value. All these values correlate, of course. That's when technology comes in. Computation will crunch all these numbers to provide plants and fish the perfect conditions.
06:42
But computation is not only needed for the growing environment. It can also help us to integrate existing technologies in buildings. For example, we can use the heat absorption of air conditioner to warm greenhouses. Additionally, rooftop farms have the benefit to act as thermal isolation for the building underneath.
07:09
And last but not least, computation will help us to automate vertical and urban farms. The reason why we should automate them is that constructing a vertical or an urban farm
07:23
needs high investments from investors, governments, and other organizations. Through automation, we can save, I have to say it, manpower, can predict outcomes, and will make sure consistent production so that investments are profitable.
07:45
So the combination of technology, nature, and cities of the future will have huge advantages. The soil-free growing methods save up to 80% of water in comparison to soil-based traditional agriculture.
08:01
At the same time, they produce more outcome because of year-round crop production, indoor production. Vertical farming not depend on arable land. It saves a lot of space because you can vertically stack the crop production.
08:21
No weather-related crop failures. It creates new jobs and provides a better climate within the city. And it significantly reduces the use of fossil fuels because we need less transportation and don't need big farm machines. I could name more advantages for ours, I'm honest.
08:42
So I would say, problem solved, in almost under 10 minutes, that's pretty awesome. Time for Q&A, or what do you think, Basti? Well, this is actually quite amazing instances of the humans' ability to innovate and to use technology to overcome own limitations or face challenges.
09:03
But it's actually far from your initial perspective to bring nature back home. And in the end, this is what basically would thrill us to be citizens of a future changed city. In our lobby this morning, there was on the wall written,
09:21
to invent an airplane is nothing, to build one is something, but to fly is everything. And in a sense, solving the food production and the food crisis was nothing we signed up for. We basically combined robotics with ecosystems just for the fun.
09:42
Because we think gardening is something you can have to feel it. And unlike high productive sky rise vertical farms, that are under high economic pressure,
10:03
we don't come any step closer to bring back nature, because it will be sterile and the only way we touch our food will be as a part of the end consumer chain, where we just buy it in a supermarket. So we wanted to have the fun and the beauty and all the glory for nature,
10:24
like sunsets, warm winds, fogs, stronger irrigation, rain perhaps, all these things. That's what we signed up for and we just did it, because our core skills are programming, hardware, design
10:42
and trying new things and not be afraid. So it turns out that when you bring nature home, you need to give it a space, a place where it can thrive, something private. And we need this thing to be understandable by humans,
11:04
and so humans have it and still nature approves. And we found that boxes are a good indicator and cats around the internet prove that boxes are definitely something that can leverage and be a basis of human-nature interaction.
11:24
So in our first setups, we set up boxes on top of each other, next to each other and put organisms inside or planted seeds, which then grew with additional light and water supply. And that's what we needed automation for,
11:42
because if you bring nature home with our agile lifestyle, nature always comes a little bit short or eventually will come short. And our plants should be watered when they needed it and not when we could provide the attention to give it to them.
12:03
And in our first setups, all these systems worked very, very fine and we had really boxes full of nature. And they were quite efficient and large and so on, but we see this as a collateral benefit of technology
12:20
and our own drive to have finally nature at home. But you see, there are so many organisms and what they need and what they require is different from plant to plant. It's not just because they are all green that they need the same stuff. And to adapt for that, our automation software, our hardware,
12:44
our robots would be as adaptable as well. But that's what we ended up with. And these are extensive cable trees and every change to our ecosystem would require programming. And I can tell you one thing, programming, computer problems, cable trees,
13:05
they are very much unlike gardening. And so, a year ago, we just sat back and said we have to overcome this. We have to make a robot that is as adaptable, as flexible as nature and that it can provide almost any environment.
13:22
We could not go with binary bots, but we wanted to modulate the strength of the wind and the water and we wanted to dim the lights. So, after a year of iterations, we came up with a set of three basic bots to build a robotic infrastructure that would take care of nature.
13:42
It consists of a muscle unit that muscles around like air pumps, water pumps and the lights and the fans and the humidifiers and whatever you can come up with. And a sensor unit that would feel the environment and detect the changes our actors cause. And all this, this muscle and sensor unit,
14:02
we integrate into our last, our third bot, the brain, no, the heart, sorry, which basically is something like an autonomous nervous system. These three bots are able to talk to each other and react to different changes
14:20
and do this on a very basic but reliable level because if you have plants and fish, then you want to have a basis where you have a very robust infrastructure because if some of the vital functions fail, you get kills and penalties in your system. And this is something which is not the fun we signed up for.
14:44
So, these bots basically reduced all our cable trees to two essential cables, this cute white one, which would stretch from sensor and motor unit and end up in the heart. And for the motor units, we would also need extra electricity
15:03
to control or power our little motors. But the question still was, would it adapt? Would it be an easier way? And we tried with the very same setup as before and we reduced the cable tree
15:21
and were able to eventually create the same robot in a fraction of the time with almost no, yeah, one has to say, thinking. We are still doing the programming part. Yeah, but this is something we already did and we had to try other setups, so we went bigger.
15:42
And this is a very, very large system and it turned out to be so heavy that we needed many people to handle it and to access our plants, which is basically not what we wanted. We wanted gardening, we wanted an easy access to our boxes, so we wanted to be hands-on with the plants
16:01
and hands-off when we are gone. But we wanted to be there without all our friends helping us to check out the basil. So, we had to go back again and make it smaller. And what we came up with, what we changed was, we changed basically the materials
16:21
and came up with more clear glass, wood and a way to hide the few cables that are left, which run through the metal tubes. And as we see, this is a monocell organism, basically a monocell robot that lives underneath the little aquarium and provides a little extra warmth
16:44
for the water while pumping the water up to the plants. And we checked it and it could as well be stacked again as a two-cell organism or as a three-cell organism. And our robotic evolution really went well.
17:01
But to find out if they would fit in the end everything, we planned to, we had to come up with new niches and things we wanted to try. So this is our cockpot minding his crescent. And yeah, so at this sense,
17:20
we have a cute robotic ecosystem. We managed to overcome the part that is cable trees. We are still working on our interface to achieve a level where we will not have to program anymore. And again, we could say problem solved. At least we are a little bit closer to nature. We have it in a private space now
17:42
and we can start gardening again. And this is where I think, this is the joy we were looking for initially, isn't it? Yeah, it actually is the joy we were looking for
18:01
because it's really nice to come to work in the morning and take a look at your plants and watch them how they're doing and have a sip of coffee and look at the temperature from last night just to make sure your plants are really, really fine when you're not at work. And you sit back and catch yourself
18:23
just starting to watch nature do its thing. But when you look at this robot, you eventually see that with all its sensors and the database and the quad core CPU that we use and the Wi-Fi accessibility, these things are actually research stations.
18:42
It's more than just blinking lights because it's collecting valuable data about plants and how their environment affects them. Every single one of the plants that your robot takes care of can be evaluated through image analysis or through sensoric or user-generated data.
19:03
And you can tinker with the knobs and dials of your robots and see how the changing environment affects your plants. That gives us a tool to finally answer some of the really great questions like, would an extra hour of light make my strawberries so much sweeter?
19:22
Or does playing Bach really enhance the composition and taste of your food? These small research stations might generate a huge amount of data, but the actual harvest, to be honest, is quite tasty, but unfortunately not that big.
19:44
If we talk about the city of the future, we need to talk about survival because cities would be kind of pointless without people living in them. So people eat a lot of food. And as it turns out, our robots don't even need boxes
20:01
to care and learn about nature. Through a bus system, the sensor and actuator boards are able to communicate with each other over a distance of 1.2 kilometers. And according to this database, we can add up to 256 nodes on our bus. So this makes our cute little robots
20:21
actually sleeping giants. What works in a small scale can go crazy big. Think about vacant lots or buildings, rooftops, facades, balconies. So many places could be so much greener and grow fresh produce all year round.
20:42
And at the same time, we could benefit from technology that takes care of our food. When we talk about the future city, we have to put ourselves in a global perspective as well because the need for affordable systems that help us grow food doesn't only exist in first world countries.
21:01
Up until now, farming technologies have been closed source and in the hands of a few. The costs for greenhouse automation are very high and the technology gap further limits access to these tools. In order to make food production easy and sustainable on a global scale, it has to be affordable as possible.
21:23
One thing you can do to make stuff really cheap is to put it in public domain. Accessibility and openness as in free heart and software don't mean things come for free, but it can help to make hardware a lot cheaper
21:40
than classic proprietary intellectual property strategies. Making a product open source changes the paradigm of competition towards collaboration. And that allows to innovate more quickly because many minds are helping on a common goal.
22:02
And obviously it's a hell of a lot more fun to work together on a common problem or common goal. So we want everyone to profit from technological advances and we want lots of people finding their own way on using them to grow healthy food anytime and anywhere.
22:25
So that gardens all around the world would connect to each other and build a network of research stations that all work together, sharing their knowledge to learn about nature. With this massive amount of data from all over the world,
22:41
we can hopefully use machine learning to find out what plants love most. Just a bit of computation gives you the means to listen to nature's needs and make wiser decisions based on statistical evidence, allowing you to use resources like water and fertilizer more sparingly and to make the ecological footprint
23:02
of food production a lot smaller. But even agriculture without a single piece of electronics can greatly benefit from this data. And this is why we have to put it out in the open as well. Just like open source, hard and software, open data makes information available
23:22
in abundance for everyone. Think about what projects like Wikipedia have done for us in regards of knowledge and education and international understanding. This kind of Wikipedia for living things could become the basis of sustainable food production
23:41
for generations to come. See our robotic ecosystems are about generating knowledge and understanding nature and they teach us how to grow happier plants. Understanding is essential
24:00
because only through observation we have gained the ability to cultivate plants in the first place. We understand our hard and software as a basic toolkit for collaboration to build the future of food production. It's easy to use, no matter the background and education, it's affordable, it's hackable and it's yours.
24:27
So together we can change the way technology is being used to aid us in our daily lives but at the same time respect nature and even help it thrive. Humans and machines working side by side to create the perfect spa for nature.
24:44
So when we imagine the city of the future with its flying cars and self-tying shoes, we really imagine a place where humans, nature and technology can happily live and work together. A place where biology and computation can co-exist in a symbiosis.
25:03
Where plants can take care of us, robots take care of plants and where we can take care of robots. We dream of cities where people come together, share their thoughts and wisdom on how to responsibly use technology to tackle the problems at hand. This is the way we can leave behind our role as a consumer,
25:23
start to have agency and have a say in how to grow what we eat. Cities where everyone that like to can become part of the solution and grow food themselves because together we can grow food in abundance.
25:42
So this concludes our talk and we have some time left. So I just want to say, maybe you want to check us out on Facebook or on Twitter so we are always happy to see more people
26:01
in our community, would be nice, thanks. Are there any questions? I think one or two questions are possible. Thank you for the very interesting talk. I actually have a couple of questions. First of all, what is your business model? Second of all, you mentioned about creating new jobs
26:24
and at the same time you said that robot farming will be automated, so how those two concepts coexist. And third question, very quick, what kind of seeds and crops will that method use, conventional or modified?
26:42
And that's it. Well, to the business model, yeah, that's a question I hear pretty often, I have to say. But just because it's open source, we still can sell it. But it's yours afterwards. So you just buy it, we offer you a system which is open source.
27:01
Of course, you can just check out our data and build it by yourself if you want to go to your local factory and build your own chips. You can do that, no problem, but I think a lot of people don't want that. But they want to have an open source hardware product or an open product, not a propriety software or hardware.
27:21
So there's not a really big difference. We just open it to the people. How do we find ourselves right now or in the future? In the future, we sell the robotic ecosystems, the small bots, which Basti showed you, and we sell the hardware, the open source hardware.
27:41
We can just sell them. It's no difference to a normal company. Yeah, of course, we need someone who buy it and use the robotic ecosystem. That's, yeah, that's, I think, what every company wants to do, sell something. But we want to do it in an open way.
28:02
I think it's time for one question, okay? Maybe we can talk afterwards. We're gonna also have our robotic ecosystem at the makerspace, so just come around. We talk about it. I was wondering, did you think about the pollutants already that at the moment tend to be in city-grown plants
28:25
and vegetables? Because that's, to my impression, the biggest problem at the moment. To be honest, we come from Weimar. This is a very cute place. No, this is the starter, but there is pollution,
28:42
but there is basically pollution everywhere. And there is, I'm sure you have all the tires that get rubbed off and the micro dust and so on and so forth. But in a certain sense, I believe we live in it every day. We breathe it when we cycle. We become these bio filters that clean up the air
29:01
during physical exercise. And our plants, in this sense, seem to be not too much affected by this. Weimar has actually a Feinstau problem. But yeah, as I've shown, the systems we try to build are basically quite closed.
29:22
And with a little bit extra tinkering or tape, you will probably seal it off. But then again, our main focus was getting a really comfortable home gardening system and then later on solve further questions and problems.
29:41
Thank you. Okay, thank you. Plants and machines connect gardens. You can connect to plants and machine on Twitter and Facebook. Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you.