Here's an update so far on the automated research pods! Emergency update! So unfortunately, and hilariously I discovered that the in-warehouse ambient CO2 levels are 700! What does this mean for the pilot trial? Well, since pod one was supposed static enrichment - at 700 ppm of CO2 injected that meant that no supplemental injection was needed. And since pod 4 was supposed to be the control - or ambient(420ppm) we got 700! Basically - pod 1, 2 and 4 got *almost* identical CO2 treatments. So 3 controls, and one treatment... Oops! BUT here's the interesting thing. Pod 3. We did validate something with this brief trial from seedling to vegetative. Pod 3 had 1000 ppm CO2 injected, with a par/light level of 100. And STILL has the same amount of growth as the other 3 pods running at basically full hog. That's 57% LESS light energy than the other pods. That's huge cost savings already, where you supplement long light hours in place of CO2. This validates the research done by NC state, Huber et al. 2021, Frontiers in Plant Science (link below) To put it very simply - HUGE cost savings for indoor growing, just by supplementing CO2 in place of light. So what's next? I already have seedlings ready to go, and we'll transfer them for another pilot study - it will be tailored to match the indoor environment of the warehouse itself. These tomatoes will be transferred to the enclosed grow room where they can begin to grow as productive tomatoes. Which is perfect since the leader/follower arm is coming soon, and we'll need plants in there ready to train the act policy. This also lets me work out some kinks in the hardware. Dying serial connections on the Arduino, and some other odds and ends. I'm also excited to share the new upgrade - which will be the camera mounted on a linear actuator. This allows the agent to determine the exact height of the plant, without the parallax effect leading to better observations from the agents, and lighting control that's reactive to the height of the plant. More soon! 🍅🤖🧪🤩

Shower thought - once these are dialed in they could contribute to decentralized/distributed agricultural research... You could run experiments with these across several different university campuses. But this is HARD. Haha. The chaos of agents + the unpredictability of custom hardware ain't for the weak.