The world's first fully robotized vertical farm
Growy, a vertical farming company based in Amsterdam, aims to produce food in a sustainable and circular manner. Their mission focuses on offering local, zero-waste, nutritious, affordable, and flavorful produce. To scale this innovative approach globally, Growy has partnered with INFO to establish the world's first fully automated, zero-waste vertical farm. By blending expertise in human-centered design, robotics, IoT sensors, and data science, they co-created a complete Farming-as-a-Service (FaaS) solution. FaaS is a promising model where Growy constructs and manages vertical farms as a service for clients. They embarked on a comprehensive journey to refine the FaaS vision and provide concrete evidence for effectively building, testing, and scaling a fully automated Plant Manager. A multidisciplinary agile team was formed to develop a minimum viable product (MVP). Utilizing an AWS-based, serverless microservice architecture, they created a system that is flexible, scalable, and cost-effective. The initial version of the Plant Manager was launched in early 2021, incorporating the latest advancements in data science for AI-driven collection and analysis of optimal growth scenarios while overseeing the daily operations of a vertical farm. This technology integrates various systems to generate, collect, analyze, and learn from data to enhance plant growth. It also automates farm operations, streamlining daily work and production scheduling. As a result, Growy can manage farming tasks completely and access data efficiently and remotely. Together, Growy and INFO have created a fully automated, AI-enhanced vertical farm that is nearly entirely circular and competitively priced compared to traditional farms.