HiPerGreen

The Dutch floriculture is globally leading, and its products, knowledge and skills are important export products. New challenges in the European research agenda include sustainable use of raw materials such as fertilizer, water and energy, and limiting the use of pesticides. Greenhouse growers however have little control over crop growth conditions in the greenhouse at individual plant level.
The purpose of this project, ‘HiPerGreen’, is to provide greenhouse owners with new methods to monitor the crop growth conditions in their greenhouse at plant level, compare the measured growth conditions and the measured growth with expected conditions and expected growth, to point out areas with deviations, recommend counter-measures and ultimately to increase their crop yield.
The main research question is:
How can we gather, process and present greenhouse crop growth parameters over large scale greenhouses in an economical way and ultimately improve crop yield?
To provide an answer to this question, a team of university researchers and companies will cooperate in this applied research project to cover several different fields of expertise
The application target is floriculture: the production of ornamental pot plants and cut flowers. Participating companies are engaged in the cultivation of pot plans, flowers and suppliers of greenhouse technology. Most of the parties fall in the SME (MKB) category, in line with the RAAK MKB objectives.Finally, the Demokwekerij and Hortipoint (the publisher of the international newsletter on floriculture) are closely involved.
The project will develop new knowledge for a smart and rugged data infrastructure for growth monitoring and growth modeling in the greenhouse. In total the project will involve approximately 12 (teacher) researchers from the universities and about 60 students, who will work in the form of internships and undergraduate studies of interesting questions directly from the participating companies.

Eindrapportage

Today’s greenhouses are extremely large, requiring growers and scouters to manage and care for millions of plants in challenging working environments. Space is limited, humidity and temperature conditions make greenhouses prone to diseases, turnover is high, labour takes time to train, etc.
Further to this, increasing human populations demand more productive agriculture. There is therefore an industry-wide call for more efficient greenhouses, where growers can take data-driven decisions.
HiPerGreen’s programme focus aim was to stimulate research and education in order to provide growers with new tools and to improve greenhouses efficiencies. After several tests and trials, the HiPerGreen team chose to develop autonomous robotic platforms such as drones and other roving systems to collect data on every plant without the need for installing complex and expensive infrastructure. After processing the data into insightful and legible information, the growers can maximize their output whilst reducing crop losses and bad decision making.
This project HiPerGreen (and its spin-off business called Applied Drone Innovation B.V. or ADI) began during an entrepreneurship minor at Inholland Delft in 2015, when students answered a call from the horticulture sector to use drones in greenhouses. By conducting this research the students generated awareness on the possibilities of the drone in the greenhouse environment. Their research won the Wij Inholland award in 2016.
The potential was clear in imaging crop over large scale. Lector Cock Heemskerk from the lectoraat Robotica saw the potential and proposed to take the idea further: a project for high precision greenhouses, HiPerGreen. Through this research project, extensive knowledge on collecting data with drones in greenhouses, processing the data and presenting it was acquired.
The funds provided by SIA RAAK to HiPerGreen was used to validate a real business need and to develop the further creation or automation of hardware and software. This was done with the support of Inholland Hogeschool and various HiPerGreen partner companies. In total, 64 students and around 18 teachers and researchers participated in the HiPerGreen project via internships/assignments and a consortium of just over 20 companies (SME, educational institutes and large companies) have participated. SIA RAAK has helped generating new value in the horticulture sector.