Design and Implementation of a Hydroponic Strawberry Monitoring and Harvesting Timing Information Supporting System Based on Nano AI-Cloud and IoT-Edge

The strawberry market in South Korea is actually the largest market among horticultural crops. Strawberry cultivation in South Korea changed from field cultivation to facility cultivation in order to increase production. However, the decrease in production manpower due to aging is increasing the demand for the automation of strawberry cultivation. Predicting the harvest of strawberries is an important research topic, as strawberry production requires the most manpower for harvest. In addition, the growing environment has a great influence on strawberry production as hydroponic cultivation of strawberries is increasing. In this paper, we design and implement an integrated system that monitors strawberry hydroponic environmental data and determines when to harvest with the concept of IoT-Edge-AI-Cloud. The proposed monitoring system collects, stores and visualizes strawberry growing environment data. The proposed harvest decision system classifies the strawberry maturity level in images using a deep learning algorithm. The monitoring and analysis results are visualized in an integrated interface, which provides a variety of basic data for strawberry cultivation. Even if the strawberry cultivation area increases, the proposed system can be easily expanded and flexibly based on a virtualized container with the concept of IoT-Edge-AI-Cloud. The monitoring system was verified by monitoring a hydroponic strawberry environment for 4 months. In addition, the harvest decision system was verified using strawberry pictures acquired from Smart Berry Farm.