The agricultural university in Wageningen and the Chinese technology company Tencent will again hold an Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge next year at the greenhouse complex in Bleiswijk.
Students and scientists from around the world are invited to develop a greenhouse complex and cultivation method for the fully automated production of vegetables, this time lettuce.
In this contest, experts from all over the world with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, greenhouse horticulture, sensor technology, and crop physiology come together.
The challenge is somewhat comparable to the annual student competition in Australia to drive as fast and as far as possible with solar cars without fuel.
The Chinese technology company Tencent ranks among the top twenty largest internet companies worldwide, including the development of computer games.
It invests billions annually in the development of new technologies and robotics.
The goal of the third edition of this greenhouse competition – to be held between June 2021 and June 2022 – is a fully automated and autonomously controlled greenhouse, without human intervention. They will try, among other things, to enable climate control and irrigation in a greenhouse to be fully autonomous and remotely managed by artificial intelligence.
In the two previous editions of the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge (in 2018 and 2019), the focus was on the fully automated production of cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. Those contests were also practically carried out in the greenhouses of WUR Greenhouse Horticulture in Bleiswijk. WUR and Tencent attracted 21 teams with more than 200 participants and 26 nationalities in previous events.
Both earlier competitions demonstrated that cultivating important greenhouse crops based on artificial intelligence makes it possible to achieve better results compared to those of skilled human growers.
However, in those earlier editions all teams still involved humans in decision-making. The goal of this third competition is the development of a fully automated system, without human intervention, for an autonomous 6- to 8-week cultivation cycle of high-quality lettuce, with high yield and efficient use of resources.