Design and Validation of an Open-Sourced Automation System for Vertical Farming

The Modular Automated Crop Array Online System (MACARONS) is a scalable, customiseable and open-sourced platform designed for plant care, monitoring, and transportation. It offers specific dosing for individual plants, automated data logging of temperature, humidity, and images, and custom behaviours programmable in Python. Monitoring and control of the system is achieved through a web-interface. The system was validated by autonomously caring for five lettuce plants over a five-week period. The system is estimated to perform the tasks required 30% faster than a human operator and can handle payloads of up to 5kg with a maximum footprint of 750mm x 500mm. The designs are released and meets the requirements of CERN-OSH-W, which includes step-by-step graphical build instructions and can be built at a cost of GBP 2241.72.