IoT-Driven Automation in Vertical Farming: A Survey

By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to hit the 9 billion mark. This will necessitate, at minimum, the doubling of food production world-wide to ensure continuous human survival. Agriculture is without doubt the most prolific food source, but with climate change and lack of arable lands, the traditional approach will not be sufficient to avoid world hunger. Vertical farming is a precision agriculture domain seeking to enhance yield per space while shortening supply chains by bringing the tech-enhanced farm to urban areas and large cities. Being a new and still in development area, though, Vertical Farming requires study and research, especially when it comes to automatization using IoT, AI and robotics. In this work we conduct a survey on the exiting works of this domain, seeking to detect the best practices and the open issues as a foundation for proposing a new optimized automatized Vertical Farming system in arid and semi-arid regions.