AmI Garden: An Intelligent Greenhouse for the Implementation of Precision Agriculture Practices

This paper introduces the concept of an intelligent greenhouse and intelligent seedbed as innovative solutions to enhance precision agriculture in small-scale cultivation settings. The core motivation behind this project lies in the need to improve cultivation practices, by reducing resource input and adopting an overall more efficient approach, while also making the system accessible both locally as well as remotely, through a variety of interfaces, to different stakeholders. While smart agriculture solutions already exist for large-scale farming, this paper has its main focus on the specific context of greenhouse cultivation in relatively smaller, scattered plots, as commonly found in Crete; the proposed intelligent greenhouse and seedbed aim to provide automated monitoring, customized cultivation support, and accessible information to various stakeholders, regardless of their level of expertise or professional involvement in farming. Despite some technical challenges, initial tests with both systems yielded promising results, helping to effectively monitor and manage the cultivation process; furthermore, users with varying levels of agricultural knowledge found the system generally easy to control. Some of the challenges faced include maintaining sub-system reliability, interference from external factors, as well as sensor limitations.