Sensor Network System for Observing Environmental Information and Growth Condition to Support Indoor Agriculture

In recent years, the aging of workers of the Japanese agricultural industry and the shortage of successors have become more serious problems. As a countermeasure against them, vegetable factories have been attracting attention for achieving stable harvests. In the vegetable factory, the construction of the sensor network consisting of the sensor nodes supporting the short-range wireless communication is focused to collect environmental information and the image pictures of the plants from various places. However, when many sensor nodes communicate at the same time in a narrow area, many packet losses occur on the communication of large amounts of data such as images. In addition, there is a need for a system to accurately estimate the growth of the plants from the collected data to stabilize and improve the efficiency of the harvest. Therefore, in this study, we develop a new sensor network system where the sensor nodes have a function of selecting an appropriate wireless channel according to a type of the communication. In addition, we propose a new method of estimating the accurate growth condition of the plant by analyzing various types of images (i.e., RGB, depth) of the target plants.