ABSTRACT
With climate change and global warming in mind, vertical farms, hydroponics and urban greenhouses can now be found in many cities worldwide as we transform the ways we produce food. Additionally, recent implications of the COVID-19 pandemic prove that as a society we can harness the benefit of remote monitoring and automation for controlled-environment agriculture and horticulture. The subject matter of this paper is implementation of a solar-powered, Internet of Things (IoT)-based Real-time Autonomous Horticulture Monitoring System (RAHMS). The RAHMS integrates a mobile application for viewing the greenhouse crop data and camera feed of plants, and interacts with cloud databases such as Firebase and MATLAB ThingSpeak for the scalability. In particular, a simple and distinctive design of a solar-powered, low energy consuming, and inexpensive greenhouse monitoring system is presented. The paper outlines RAHMS design methodology and showcases a proof-of-concept prototype with its core hardware and software components. The proposed system has a potential to further advance the practical aspects of the remote solutions for the cultivation and monitoring of horticulture and controlled-environment agriculture. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.