Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists

TL;DR

This study systematically compares an automated indoor farming system, AlphaGarden, to professional horticulturalists, showing comparable plant coverage and diversity, with significantly reduced water use.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of AlphaGarden's performance against human experts in polyculture farming, highlighting its efficiency and potential for automation.

Findings

AlphaGarden matches human performance in coverage and diversity.

AlphaGarden reduces water consumption by up to 44%.

Automated system demonstrates potential for scalable indoor farming.

Abstract

The AlphaGarden is an automated testbed for indoor polyculture farming which combines a first-order plant simulator, a gantry robot, a seed planting algorithm, plant phenotyping and tracking algorithms, irrigation sensors and algorithms, and custom pruning tools and algorithms. In this paper, we systematically compare the performance of the AlphaGarden to professional horticulturalists on the staff of the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract Greenhouse. The humans and the machine tend side-by-side polyculture gardens with the same seed arrangement. We compare performance in terms of canopy coverage, plant diversity, and water consumption. Results from two 60-day cycles suggest that the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists in terms of coverage and diversity, and reduces water consumption by as much as 44%. Code, videos, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/systematiccomparison.