AMBIENTE IOT DE EXPERIMENTAÇAO EM AGRICULTURA VERTICAL INDOOR

Abstract

The growing challenge of meeting the global demand for food in a sustainable and efficient manner has driven the adoption of innovative techniques, such as vertical farming and Agriculture 4.0. In this context, although vertical farming has shown relevant advances in terms of efficient resource use and the possibility of production in controlled environments close to urban centers, there is still a need to monitor, control, and predict variations and failures in cultivation parameters. Thus, a gap remains regarding the development of integrated IoT architectures capable of combining environmental monitoring, automation, traceability, and support for experimental management in an interconnected way. This work proposes a technological system to monitor the indoor cultivation environment, automate equipment, and enable the remote monitoring of experiments. As a solution, an IoT-based indoor vertical farming environment was developed using microcontrollers, temperature, relative humidity, and luminosity sensors detected by LDR, in addition to actuators responsible for fertigation, artificial lighting, and ventilation. The system was integrated with Arduino Cloud for data visualization, storage, and export, as well as with an ESP32-CAM for periodic image recording. Operational validation was carried out during 32 days of experimental strawberry cultivation, considering records of temperature, humidity, luminosity, operational notifications, and visual monitoring. The results indicated the proper functioning of the proposed architecture, allowing the identification of microclimatic variations between chambers and the documentation of system operation. As sufficient quantitative agronomic variables were not collected, this study does not demonstrate increased plant productivity, but it validates a functional technological platform to support future experiments on productive efficiency, environmental control, and automation in indoor vertical farming.