A Measurement-Driven Digital Twin Architecture for Plant-Level Biomass Estimation and Growth Forecasting in Hydroponic Systems

Abstract

Alternatives to soil-based horticulture, such as hydroponics, have been developed to respond to food distribution concerns for dense urban centers. A new system was developed to track an individual lettuce plant's growth in a hydroponic environment, utilizing streams of measured information and available models to continuously update the growth trajectory estimates for a plant. These "digital twin" models were integrated into an operating hydroponic greenhouse, with custom horticultural and sensor hardware to grow and measure relevant information. To aid in updating model parameters, plant yield was continuously measured with a custom neural network, using RGB-D images of the plants as an input. The network, trained on a collected dataset of 1300 images, was able to estimate mass within 1.5 g of the ground-truth value. After integration into the custom system, digital twin growth projections could approximate future yield between one and four days in the future, maintaining around a 2 g forecasting error.

Code and data availability

The paper describes a paper-specific RGB-D lettuce dataset (1,308 measurements of 125 plants) and an associated code base, but states only that they 'will be made publicly available at:' with no URL provided, and no allowed_urls exist. No public, actionable asset can be verified.

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