What if Robots ♥ Nature?
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Herrmann, Nicolas
Buegler, Bastian
Breuer, Martin
Looking at the city of the future as an ecosystem, with a high net import of food over long distances, growing food within the city can be an alleviating factor to battle a cities food dependency. Be it rooftop or vertical farms, balconies or indoor gardens – all these approaches require extensive care, regular upkeeping and attention. What if robots would help us with that?
 Yeah, let's start. So thanks for coming around to our talk. I'm Nico from Planes Machines. You will also get known to Basti and Martin. They will talk as well. We are a bunch of guys from Weimar who try to convince technology to love nature. Today, we will tell you how we can bring nature and food production into our future cities and how robots will help us with that. At the beginning of our talk, I have to tell you that bringing nature back into our cities isn't a brand new idea. There is a long history of vertical and urban farming concepts. In 1890, already, Ibn Nader Howard came up with the idea of the garden city. He wanted to restructure cities in a way that they would integrate into nature rather than consume it. In the 30s, Frank Lloyd Wright had an even more radical plan. His concept was that each family should own one acre of land for housing and growing their own food. You can see it here in the middle of the slide. And Le Corbusier's concept from the 20s suggested to densify the city into high-rise towers surrounded by green space. So there are a lot of concepts out there, but today, the problem is a lot of bigger. And nowadays, cities are even bigger than during the time the concepts I showed you were made. We'll be 10 billion people in 2050. Most of us will live in meagre cities, especially in South America, in Asia. And there will be not enough arable land for traditional agriculture, while everyone from us wants to eat happy cows or meat from happy cows, happy fish, and vegetables from organic farms. Additionally, the climate change starts to impact our food production. I think the drought in California that you can see here on the right or left hand side from my side, you can see it there that the climate change impact our food production. And when I say traditional agriculture, I mean industrial agriculture like we practice it today. And you can see it here in the middle, how that looks. And so if we just look at the problems, and I only mentioned a few of our food security problems, we could definitely say we are doomed. We fucked up. And we will starve if we just look at the problems. But of course, we are not fucked up. There are a lot of solutions out there. And we just want to talk about one of them today. And that's urban and vertical farming. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And we're going to talk about the future. And that's urban and vertical farming. Vertical and urban farming experiences a huge hype over the past 10 years. And the industry is picking up now. Dixon de Spomier, a professor of the Columbia University, is the father of this concept. The idea is to produce food in tall buildings and unused areas like rooftops and old factory buildings within the city. There are numbers of examples out there that show how it could work. For example, the ECF farm from ECF farm systems here in Berlin. It's an aquaponics farm. The huge greenhouses from farm here in Chicago, or the Skry Green vertical farm in Singapore, that soon will produce two tons of vegetables per day. You can see that the growing beds, you can see it here on the pictures, on the left hand side, is farmed here, the farm in Chicago. And on the right hand side, it's green sky farms in Singapore. You can see that the growing beds are stacked over each other and are illuminated with extra LED light. That's why we call it vertical farming. The most of these farms work with growing methods like hydroponic and aquaponics, which are boss soil free methods. That means the crops grow in grow beds, plastic grow beds, where the roots are watered with the exact nutrient dosage they need. Hydroponic needs external nutrients to be added in case of aquaponics. We combine growing plants with fish farming. The dirty water of the fish allows the farmer to grow plants without using extra fertilizer. At the end, we have a double outcome. Fish and fresh vegetables like lettuce, tomatoes, or herbs, and they are all organic. It's an ecosystem like nature. Different organisms help each other to grow. These pictures here are from an urban farm, from urban organics, and they are from a Minneapolis in the USA. So they use aquaponics to grow food. To have the perfect growing environment for plants and fish within the city, we have to control the environmental conditions. Especially fish are a real sensitive organism who need a lot of care. And if you look on Amiga City out of stones, glass, and steel, you will recognize very fast that Amiga cities aren't an area where plants want to grow. That's why we have to provide the right growing environment. In vertical and urban farms, we are able to control temperature, humidity, the light spectrum, CO2, and the nutrient supply or the pH value. All these values correlate, of course. That's when technology comes in. Computation will crunch all these numbers to provide plants and fish the perfect conditions. But computation is not only needed for the growing environment. It can also help us to integrate existing technologies in buildings. For example, we can use the heat absorption of air conditioner to warm greenhouses. Additionally, rooftop farms have the benefit to act as a thermal isolation for the building underneath. And last but not least, computation will help us to automate vertical and urban farms. The reason why we should automate them is that constructing a vertical or an urban farm needs high investments from investors, governments, and other organizations. Through automation, we can save, I have to say it, manpower, can predict outcomes, and will make sure a consistent production so that investments are profitable. So the combination of technology, nature, and cities of the future will have huge advantages. The soil free growing methods save up to 80%, 80% of water in comparison to soil-based traditional agriculture. At the same time, they produce more outcome because of year round crop production, indoor production. Vertical farming not depend on arable land. It saves a lot of space because you can vertically stack the crop production. No weather related crop failures. It creates new jobs. And provides a better climate within the city. And it significantly reduces the use of fossil fuels because we need less transportation and don't need big farm machines. I could name more advantages for ours, I'm honest. So I would say problem solved in almost under 10 minutes. That's pretty awesome. Time for Q&A, or what do you think, Bestie? Well, this is actually quite amazing instances of the human's ability to innovate and to use technology to overcome own limitations or face challenges. But it's actually far from your initial perspective to bring nature back home. And in the end, this is what basically would thrill us to be citizens of a future changed city. In our lobby this morning, there was on the wall written, to invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything. And in a sense, this solving the food production and the food crisis was nothing we signed up for. We basically combined robotics with ecosystems just for the fun. Because we think gardening is something you can have to feel and to touch. And unlike high productive sky rise vertical farms that are under high economic pressure, we don't come any step closer to bring back nature. Because it will be sterile. And the only way we touch our food will be as a part of the end consumer chain, where we just buy it in a supermarket. So we wanted to have the fun and the beauty and all the glory for nature. Like sunsets, warm winds, fox, stronger irrigation, rain, perhaps, all these things. That's what we signed up for. And we just did it because our core skills are programming, hardware, design. And trying new things and not be afraid. So it turns out that when you bring nature home, you need to give it a space, a place where it can drive, something private. And we need this thing to be understandable by humans. And so humans have it. And still, so nature approves. And we found that boxes are a good indicator. And cats around the internet prove that boxes are definitely something that can leverage and be a basis of human-nature interaction. So in our first setups, we set up boxes on top of each other, next to each other, and put organisms inside, or planted seeds, which then grew with additional light. And water, supply. And that's what we needed automation for. Because if you bring nature home with our agile lifestyle, nature always comes a little bit short, or eventually will come short. And our plants should be watered when they needed it, and not when we could provide the attention to give it to them. And in our first setups, all these systems worked very, very fine. And we had really boxes full of nature. And they were quite efficient and large and so on. But we see this as a collateral benefit of technology and our own drive to have finally nature at home. But you see, there are so many organisms. And what they need and what they require is different from plant to plant. It's not just because they are all green that they need the same stuff. And to adapt for that, our automation software, or hardware, our robots, would be as adaptable as well. But that's what we ended up with. And in these extensive cable trees, and every change to our ecosystem, would require programming. And I can tell you one thing, programming, computer problems, cable trees, they are very much unlike gardening. And so a year ago, we just said back and said, we have to overcome this. We have to make a robot that is as adaptable, as flexible as nature, and that it can provide almost any environment. We could not go with binary bots, but we wanted to modulate the strength of the wind and the water. And we wanted to dim the lights. So after a year of iterations, we came up with a set of three basic bots to build a robotic infrastructure that would take care of nature. It consists of a muscle unit that muscles around, like air pumps, water pumps, and the lights, and the fans, and the humidifiers, and whatever you can come up with. And a sensor unit that would feel the environment and detect the changes our actors cause. And all this, this muscle and sensor unit, we integrate into our last, our third bot, the brain, no, the heart, sorry, which basically is something like an autonomous nervous system. These three bots are able to talk to each other and react to different changes and do this on a very basic, but reliable level. Because if you have plants and fish, then you want to have a basis where you have a very robust infrastructure. Because if some of the vital functions fail, you get kills and penalties in your system. And this is something which is not the fun we signed up for. So these bots basically reduced all our cable trees to two essential cables. This cute white one, which would stretch from sensor and motor unit and end up in the heart. And for the motor units, we would also need extra electricity to control our power, our little motors. But the question still was, would it adapt? Would it be an easier way? And we tried with the very same setup as before. And we reduced the cable tree and were able to eventually create the same robot in a fraction of the time with almost no, one has to say, thinking. We are still doing the programming part. Yeah, but this is something we already did. And then we had to try other setups. So we went bigger. And this is a very, very large system. And it turned out to be so heavy that we needed many people to handle it and to access our plants, which is basically not what we wanted. We wanted gardening. We wanted an easy access to our boxes. So we wanted to be hands on with the plants and hands off when we are gone. But we wanted to be there without all our friends helping us to check out the basil. So we had to go back again and make it smaller. And what we came up with, what we changed, was we changed basically the materials. And came up with more clear glass wood and a way to hide the few cables that are left, which run through the metal tubes. And as we see, this is a monocel organism, basically a monocel robot that lives underneath the little aquarium and provides a little extra warmth for the water while pumping the water up to the plants. And we checked it, and it could all as well be stacked again as a two cell organism or as a three cell organism. And our robotic evolution really went well. But to find out if they would fit in the end everything we planned to, we had to come up with new niches and things we wanted to try. So this is our cork bot, minding his crescent. And yeah, so at this sense, we have an evacuate robotic ecosystem. We managed to overcome the part that is cable trees. We are still working on our interface to achieve a level where we will not have to program anymore. And again, we could say problem solved. At least we are a little bit closer to nature. We have it in a private space now, and we can start gardening again. And this is where I think this is the joy we were looking for initially, isn't it? Yeah, it actually is the joy we were looking for, because it's really nice to come to work in the morning and take a look at your plants and watch them, how they're doing, and have a sip of coffee and look at the temperature from last night just to make sure your plants are really, really fine when you're not at work. And you sit back and catch yourself just starting to watch nature do its thing. But when you look at this robot, you eventually see that with all its sensors and the database and the quad core CPU that we use and the Wi-Fi accessibility, these things are actually research stations. It's more than just blinking lights, because it's collecting valuable data about plants and how their environment affects them. Every single one of the plants that your robot takes care of can be evaluated through image analysis or through sensoric or user-generated data. And you can tinker with the knobs and dials of your robots and see how the changing environment affects your plants. That gives us a tool to finally answer some of the really great questions like, would an extra hour of light make my strawberries so much sweeter? Or does playing Bach really enhance the composition and taste of your food? These small research stations might generate a huge amount of data, but the actual harvest to be honest is quite tasty, but unfortunately not that big. If we talk about the city of the future, we need to talk about survival, because cities would be kind of pointless without people living in them. So people eat a lot of food. And as it turns out, our robots don't even need boxes to care and learn about nature. Through a bus system, the sensor and actuator boards are able to communicate with each other over a distance of 1.2 kilometers. And according to this database, we can add up to 256 nodes on our bus. So this makes our cute little robots actually sleeping giants. What works in a small scale can go crazy big. Think about vacant lots or listings, roof tops, faxing on the subtitles. It's a small postonde in Germany. We've had just a small potential cost that people feel threatened by city needs.sight or budget. buildings, rooftops, facades, balconies. So many places could be so much greener and grow fresh produce all year round. And at the same time we could benefit from technology that takes care of our food. When we talk about the future city we have to put ourselves in a global perspective as well. Because the need for affordable systems that help us grow food doesn't only exist in first world countries. Up until now farming technologies have been closed sauce and in the hands of a few. The costs for greenhouse automation are very high and the technology gap further limits access to these tools. In order to make food production easy and sustainable on a global scale it has to be affordable as possible. One thing you can make one thing you can do to make stuff really cheap is to put it in public domain. Accessibility and openness as in free hardened software don't mean things come for free but it can help to make hardware a lot cheaper than classic proprietary intellectual property strategies. Making a product open source changes the paradigm of competition towards collaboration. And that allows to innovate more quickly because many minds are helping on a common goal. And obviously it's a hell of a lot more fun to work together on a common problem or common goal. So we want to we want everyone to profit from technological advances and we want lots of people finding their own way on using them to grow healthy food anytime and anywhere. So that gardens all around the world would connect to each other and build a network of research stations that all work together sharing their knowledge to learn about nature. With this massive amount of data from all over the world we can hopefully use machine learning to find out what plants love most. Just a bit of computation gives you the means to listen to nature's needs and make wiser decisions based on statistical evidence. Allowing you to use resources like water and fertilizer most sparingly and to make the ecological footprint of food production a lot smaller. But even agriculture without a single piece of electronics can greatly benefit from this data and this is why we have to put it out in the open as well. Just like open source hard and software open data makes information available in abundance for everyone. Think about what projects like Wikipedia have done for us in regards of knowledge and education and international understanding. This kind of Wikipedia for living things could become the basis of sustainable food production for generations to come. See our robotic ecosystems are about generating knowledge and understanding nature and they teach us how to grow happier plants. Understanding is essential because only through observation we have gained the ability to cultivate plants in the first place. We understand our hard and software as a basic toolkit for collaboration to build the future of food production. It's easy to use no matter the background in education it's affordable, it's hackable and it's yours. So together we can change the way technology is being used to aid us in our daily lives but at the same time respect nature and even help it thrive. Humans and machines working side by side to create the perfect spa for nature. So when we imagine the city of the future with its flying cars and self-tying shoes we really imagine a place where humans, nature and technology can happily live and work together. A place where biology and computation can coexist in a symbiosis. Where plants can take care of us, robots take care of plants and when where we can take care of robots. We dream of cities where people come together share their thoughts and wisdom on how to responsively use technology to tackle the problems at hand. This is the way we can leave behind a role as a consumer start to have agency and have a say in how to grow what we eat. Cities where everyone that like to can become part of the solution and grow food themselves because together we can grow food in abundance. So this concludes our talk and we have some time left. So just want to say maybe you want to check us out on Facebook or on Twitter so we are always happy to see more people in our community. Would be nice. Thanks. Are there any questions? I think one or two questions are possible. Thank you for the very interesting talk. I actually have a couple of questions. First of all, what is your business model? Second of all, you mentioned about creating new jobs and at the same time you said that robot farming will be automated. So how those two concepts coexist? And third question very quick. What kind of seeds and crops will that method use conventional or modified? Well, to the business model. Yeah, that's that's a question I hear pretty often I have to say but just because it's open source we still can sell it but it's yours afterwards. So you just buy it. We offer you a system which is open source. Of course you can just check out our data and build it by yourself if you want to go to your local factory and build your own chips. You can do that no problem but I think a lot of people don't want that but they want to have an open source hardware product or an open product not a proprietary software hardware. So there's not a really big difference. We just open it to the people. How do we fund ourselves and right now or in the future? In the future we sell the robotic ecosystems, the small bots which Basti showed you and we sell the hardware, the open source hardware. We can just sell them. It's no difference to normal company. Yeah, of course we need someone who buy it and use the robotic ecosystem. That's yeah that's that's I think what every company wants to do. Sell something. But we want to do it in an open way. I think it's time for one question. Okay. Maybe we can talk afterwards. We're going to also have our robotic ecosystem at the maker space so just come around. We talk about it. I was wondering did you think about the pollutants already that at the moment tend to be in city grown plants and vegetables? Because that's to my impression the biggest problem at the moment. Well to be honest we come from Weimar. This is a very cute place. No this is the starter but there is pollution but there's basically pollution everywhere. And there is this sure you have all the tires that get robbed off and the micro dust and so on and so forth. But you know in a certain sense I believe we live in it every day. We breathe it when we cycle. We become these bio filters that clean up the air during physical exercise. And our plants in this sense seem to be not too much affected by this. Weimar has actually a fine-stout problem. But yeah we as you see as I've shown the systems we we tried to build are basically quite closed and with a little bit extra tinkering or tape you will probably seal it off. But then again it's our main focus was getting a really comfortable home gardening system and then later on solve further questions and problems. Thank you. Okay thank you. Plants and machines connect gardens. You can connect to plant a machine on Twitter and Facebook. Okay thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
 Yeah, let's start.  So thanks for coming around to our talk.  I'm Nico from Planes Machines.  You will also get known to Basti and Martin.  They will talk as well.  We are a bunch of guys from Weimar  who try to convince technology to love nature.  Today, we will tell you how we can bring nature and food  production into our future cities and how robots will  help us with that.  At the beginning of our talk, I have  to tell you that bringing nature back into our cities  isn't a brand new idea.  There is a long history of vertical and urban farming  concepts.  In 1890, already, Ibn Nader Howard  came up with the idea of the garden city.  He wanted to restructure cities in a way  that they would integrate into nature rather than consume it.  In the 30s, Frank Lloyd Wright had an even more radical plan.  His concept was that each family should own one acre of land  for housing and growing their own food.  You can see it here in the middle of the slide.  And Le Corbusier's concept from the 20s  suggested to densify the city into high-rise towers  surrounded by green space.  So there are a lot of concepts out there,  but today, the problem is a lot of bigger.  And nowadays, cities are even bigger  than during the time the concepts I showed you were made.  We'll be 10 billion people in 2050.  Most of us will live in meagre cities, especially  in South America, in Asia.  And there will be not enough arable land  for traditional agriculture, while everyone from us  wants to eat happy cows or meat from happy cows, happy fish,  and vegetables from organic farms.  Additionally, the climate change starts to impact our food  production.  I think the drought in California that you can see here  on the right or left hand side from my side,  you can see it there that the climate change  impact our food production.  And when I say traditional agriculture,  I mean industrial agriculture like we practice it today.  And you can see it here in the middle, how that looks.  And so if we just look at the problems,  and I only mentioned a few of our food security problems,  we could definitely say we are doomed.  We fucked up.  And we will starve if we just look at the problems.  But of course, we are not fucked up.  There are a lot of solutions out there.  And we just want to talk about one of them today.  And that's urban and vertical farming.  And that's what we're going to talk about today.  And we're going to talk about the future.  And that's urban and vertical farming.  Vertical and urban farming experiences a huge hype  over the past 10 years.  And the industry is picking up now.  Dixon de Spomier, a professor of the Columbia University,  is the father of this concept.  The idea is to produce food in tall buildings and unused  areas like rooftops and old factory buildings within the city.  There are numbers of examples out there  that show how it could work.  For example, the ECF farm from ECF farm systems here in Berlin.  It's an aquaponics farm.  The huge greenhouses from farm here in Chicago,  or the Skry Green vertical farm in Singapore,  that soon will produce two tons of vegetables per day.  You can see that the growing beds,  you can see it here on the pictures, on the left hand side,  is farmed here, the farm in Chicago.  And on the right hand side, it's green sky farms in Singapore.  You can see that the growing beds are stacked over each other  and are illuminated with extra LED light.  That's why we call it vertical farming.  The most of these farms work with growing  methods like hydroponic and aquaponics, which are boss soil  free methods.  That means the crops grow in grow beds, plastic grow beds,  where the roots are watered with the exact nutrient dosage  they need.  Hydroponic needs external nutrients  to be added in case of aquaponics.  We combine growing plants with fish farming.  The dirty water of the fish allows the farmer  to grow plants without using extra fertilizer.  At the end, we have a double outcome.  Fish and fresh vegetables like lettuce, tomatoes, or herbs,  and they are all organic.  It's an ecosystem like nature.  Different organisms help each other to grow.  These pictures here are from an urban farm,  from urban organics, and they are from a Minneapolis  in the USA.  So they use aquaponics to grow food.  To have the perfect growing environment for plants and fish  within the city, we have to control the environmental  conditions.  Especially fish are a real sensitive organism  who need a lot of care.  And if you look on Amiga City out of stones, glass, and steel,  you will recognize very fast that Amiga cities  aren't an area where plants want to grow.  That's why we have to provide the right growing environment.  In vertical and urban farms, we are  able to control temperature, humidity, the light spectrum,  CO2, and the nutrient supply or the pH value.  All these values correlate, of course.  That's when technology comes in.  Computation will crunch all these numbers  to provide plants and fish the perfect conditions.  But computation is not only needed  for the growing environment.  It can also help us to integrate existing technologies  in buildings.  For example, we can use the heat absorption of air  conditioner to warm greenhouses.  Additionally, rooftop farms have the benefit  to act as a thermal isolation for the building underneath.  And last but not least, computation  will help us to automate vertical and urban farms.  The reason why we should automate them  is that constructing a vertical or an urban farm  needs high investments from investors, governments,  and other organizations.  Through automation, we can save, I have to say it, manpower,  can predict outcomes, and will make sure a consistent  production so that investments are profitable.  So the combination of technology, nature, and cities  of the future will have huge advantages.  The soil free growing methods save up to 80%, 80%  of water in comparison to soil-based traditional agriculture.  At the same time, they produce more outcome  because of year round crop production, indoor production.  Vertical farming not depend on arable land.  It saves a lot of space because you can vertically  stack the crop production.  No weather related crop failures.  It creates new jobs.  And provides a better climate within the city.  And it significantly reduces the use of fossil fuels  because we need less transportation  and don't need big farm machines.  I could name more advantages for ours, I'm honest.  So I would say problem solved in almost under 10 minutes.  That's pretty awesome.  Time for Q&A, or what do you think, Bestie?  Well, this is actually quite amazing instances  of the human's ability to innovate and to use technology  to overcome own limitations or face challenges.  But it's actually far from your initial perspective  to bring nature back home.  And in the end, this is what basically would  thrill us to be citizens of a future changed city.  In our lobby this morning, there was on the wall written,  to invent an airplane is nothing.  To build one is something.  But to fly is everything.  And in a sense, this solving the food production  and the food crisis was nothing we signed up for.  We basically combined robotics with ecosystems  just for the fun.  Because we think gardening is something  you can have to feel and to touch.  And unlike high productive sky rise vertical farms  that are under high economic pressure,  we don't come any step closer to bring back nature.  Because it will be sterile.  And the only way we touch our food  will be as a part of the end consumer chain, where  we just buy it in a supermarket.  So we wanted to have the fun and the beauty  and all the glory for nature.  Like sunsets, warm winds, fox, stronger irrigation, rain,  perhaps, all these things.  That's what we signed up for.  And we just did it because our core skills are programming,  hardware, design.  And trying new things and not be afraid.  So it turns out that when you bring nature home,  you need to give it a space, a place where it can drive,  something private.  And we need this thing to be understandable by humans.  And so humans have it.  And still, so nature approves.  And we found that boxes are a good indicator.  And cats around the internet prove  that boxes are definitely something  that can leverage and be a basis of human-nature interaction.  So in our first setups, we set up boxes on top of each other,  next to each other, and put organisms inside,  or planted seeds, which then grew with additional light.  And water, supply.  And that's what we needed automation for.  Because if you bring nature home with our agile lifestyle,  nature always comes a little bit short,  or eventually will come short.  And our plants should be watered when they needed it,  and not when we could provide the attention to give it to them.  And in our first setups, all these systems  worked very, very fine.  And we had really boxes full of nature.  And they were quite efficient and large and so on.  But we see this as a collateral benefit of technology  and our own drive to have finally nature at home.  But you see, there are so many organisms.  And what they need and what they require  is different from plant to plant.  It's not just because they are all green  that they need the same stuff.  And to adapt for that, our automation software,  or hardware, our robots, would be as adaptable as well.  But that's what we ended up with.  And in these extensive cable trees,  and every change to our ecosystem, would require programming.  And I can tell you one thing, programming, computer problems,  cable trees, they are very much unlike gardening.  And so a year ago, we just said back  and said, we have to overcome this.  We have to make a robot that is as adaptable, as flexible  as nature, and that it can provide almost any environment.  We could not go with binary bots,  but we wanted to modulate the strength of the wind and the water.  And we wanted to dim the lights.  So after a year of iterations, we came up  with a set of three basic bots to build a robotic infrastructure  that would take care of nature.  It consists of a muscle unit that muscles around,  like air pumps, water pumps, and the lights, and the fans,  and the humidifiers, and whatever you can come up with.  And a sensor unit that would feel the environment  and detect the changes our actors cause.  And all this, this muscle and sensor unit,  we integrate into our last, our third bot, the brain, no,  the heart, sorry, which basically is something  like an autonomous nervous system.  These three bots are able to talk to each other  and react to different changes and do this on a very basic,  but reliable level.  Because if you have plants and fish,  then you want to have a basis where you have a very robust  infrastructure.  Because if some of the vital functions fail,  you get kills and penalties in your system.  And this is something which is not the fun we signed up for.  So these bots basically reduced all our cable  trees to two essential cables.  This cute white one, which would stretch from sensor and motor  unit and end up in the heart.  And for the motor units, we would also  need extra electricity to control our power, our little motors.  But the question still was, would it adapt?  Would it be an easier way?  And we tried with the very same setup as before.  And we reduced the cable tree and were  able to eventually create the same robot in a fraction  of the time with almost no, one has to say, thinking.  We are still doing the programming part.  Yeah, but this is something we already did.  And then we had to try other setups.  So we went bigger.  And this is a very, very large system.  And it turned out to be so heavy that we  needed many people to handle it and to access our plants, which  is basically not what we wanted.  We wanted gardening.  We wanted an easy access to our boxes.  So we wanted to be hands on with the plants and hands off  when we are gone.  But we wanted to be there without all our friends  helping us to check out the basil.  So we had to go back again and make it smaller.  And what we came up with, what we changed,  was we changed basically the materials.  And came up with more clear glass wood  and a way to hide the few cables that are left, which  run through the metal tubes.  And as we see, this is a monocel organism, basically  a monocel robot that lives underneath the little aquarium  and provides a little extra warmth for the water  while pumping the water up to the plants.  And we checked it, and it could all as well be stacked again  as a two cell organism or as a three cell organism.  And our robotic evolution really went well.  But to find out if they would fit in the end everything  we planned to, we had to come up with new niches  and things we wanted to try.  So this is our cork bot, minding his crescent.  And yeah, so at this sense, we have an evacuate robotic  ecosystem.  We managed to overcome the part that is cable trees.  We are still working on our interface to achieve a level  where we will not have to program anymore.  And again, we could say problem solved.  At least we are a little bit closer to nature.  We have it in a private space now,  and we can start gardening again.  And this is where I think this is the joy we were looking for  initially, isn't it?  Yeah, it actually is the joy we were looking for,  because it's really nice to come to work in the morning  and take a look at your plants and watch them,  how they're doing, and have a sip of coffee  and look at the temperature from last night  just to make sure your plants are really, really fine  when you're not at work.  And you sit back and catch yourself just  starting to watch nature do its thing.  But when you look at this robot, you eventually  see that with all its sensors and the database and the quad  core CPU that we use and the Wi-Fi accessibility,  these things are actually research stations.  It's more than just blinking lights,  because it's collecting valuable data about plants  and how their environment affects them.  Every single one of the plants that your robot takes care of  can be evaluated through image analysis or through sensoric  or user-generated data.  And you can tinker with the knobs and dials of your robots  and see how the changing environment  affects your plants.  That gives us a tool to finally answer some of the really great  questions like, would an extra hour of light  make my strawberries so much sweeter?  Or does playing Bach really enhance the composition  and taste of your food?  These small research stations might generate  a huge amount of data, but the actual harvest to be  honest is quite tasty, but unfortunately not that big.  If we talk about the city of the future,  we need to talk about survival, because cities would  be kind of pointless without people living in them.  So people eat a lot of food.  And as it turns out, our robots don't even  need boxes to care and learn about nature.  Through a bus system, the sensor and actuator boards  are able to communicate with each other over a distance  of 1.2 kilometers.  And according to this database, we can add up to 256  nodes on our bus.  So this makes our cute little robots actually sleeping giants.  What works in a small scale can go crazy big.  Think about vacant lots or  listings, roof tops, faxing on the subtitles.  It's a small postonde in Germany.  We've had  just a small potential cost that people  feel threatened by city needs. sight or budget.  buildings, rooftops, facades, balconies. So many places could be so much greener  and grow fresh produce all year round. And at the same time we could benefit  from technology that takes care of our food. When we talk about the future  city we have to put ourselves in a global perspective as well. Because the  need for affordable systems that help us grow food doesn't only exist in first  world countries. Up until now farming technologies have been closed sauce and  in the hands of a few. The costs for greenhouse automation are very high and  the technology gap further limits access to these tools. In order to make food  production easy and sustainable on a global scale it has to be affordable as  possible. One thing you can make one thing you can do to make stuff really  cheap is to put it in public domain. Accessibility and openness as in free  hardened software don't mean things come for free but it can help to make  hardware a lot cheaper than classic proprietary intellectual property  strategies. Making a product open source changes the paradigm of competition  towards collaboration. And that allows to innovate more quickly because many  minds are helping on a common goal. And obviously it's a hell of a lot more fun  to work together on a common problem or common goal. So we want to we want  everyone to profit from technological advances and we want lots of people  finding their own way on using them to grow healthy food anytime and anywhere.  So that gardens all around the world would connect to each other and build a  network of research stations that all work together sharing their knowledge to  learn about nature. With this massive amount of data from all over the world  we can hopefully use machine learning to find out what plants love most. Just a  bit of computation gives you the means to listen to nature's needs and make  wiser decisions based on statistical evidence. Allowing you to use resources  like water and fertilizer most sparingly and to make the ecological footprint of  food production a lot smaller. But even agriculture without a single piece of  electronics can greatly benefit from this data and this is why we have to put  it out in the open as well. Just like open source hard and software open data  makes information available in abundance for everyone. Think about what  projects like Wikipedia have done for us in regards of knowledge and education  and international understanding. This kind of Wikipedia for living things could  become the basis of sustainable food production for generations to come.  See our robotic ecosystems are about generating knowledge and understanding  nature and they teach us how to grow happier plants. Understanding is  essential because only through observation we have gained the ability to  cultivate plants in the first place. We understand our hard and software as a  basic toolkit for collaboration to build the future of food production. It's easy  to use no matter the background in education it's affordable, it's  hackable and it's yours. So together we can change the way technology is being  used to aid us in our daily lives but at the same time respect nature and even  help it thrive. Humans and machines working side by side to create the  perfect spa for nature. So when we imagine the city of the future with its  flying cars and self-tying shoes we really imagine a place where humans,  nature and technology can happily live and work together. A place where biology  and computation can coexist in a symbiosis. Where plants can take care of us,  robots take care of plants and when where we can take care of robots. We dream of  cities where people come together share their thoughts and wisdom on how to  responsively use technology to tackle the problems at hand. This is the way we  can leave behind a role as a consumer start to have agency and have a say in  how to grow what we eat. Cities where everyone that like to can become part of  the solution and grow food themselves because together we can grow food in  abundance. So this concludes our talk and we have some time left.  So just want to say maybe you want to check us out on Facebook or on Twitter  so we are always happy to see more people in our community. Would be nice. Thanks.  Are there any questions? I think one or two questions are possible.  Thank you for the very interesting talk. I actually have a couple of questions.  First of all, what is your business model? Second of all, you mentioned about  creating new jobs and at the same time you said that robot farming will be  automated. So how those two concepts coexist? And third question very quick.  What kind of seeds and crops will that method use conventional or modified?  Well, to the business model. Yeah, that's that's a question I hear pretty often I  have to say but just because it's open source we still can sell it but it's  yours afterwards. So you just buy it. We offer you a system which is open source.  Of course you can just check out our data and build it by yourself if you want  to go to your local factory and build your own chips. You can do that no  problem but I think a lot of people don't want that but they want to have an  open source hardware product or an open product not a proprietary software  hardware. So there's not a really big difference. We just open it to the people.  How do we fund ourselves and right now or in the future? In the future we sell the  robotic ecosystems, the small bots which Basti showed you and we sell the  hardware, the open source hardware. We can just sell them. It's no difference to  normal company.  Yeah, of course we need someone who buy it and use the robotic ecosystem. That's  yeah that's that's I think what every company wants to do. Sell something. But  we want to do it in an open way. I think it's time for one question. Okay. Maybe we  can talk afterwards. We're going to also have our robotic ecosystem at the maker  space so just come around. We talk about it.  I was wondering did you think about the pollutants already that at the moment  tend to be in city grown plants and vegetables? Because that's to my  impression the biggest problem at the moment.  Well to be honest we come from Weimar. This is a very cute place. No this is the  starter but there is pollution but there's basically pollution everywhere.  And there is this sure you have all the tires that get robbed off and the  micro dust and so on and so forth. But you know in a certain sense I believe we  live in it every day. We breathe it when we cycle. We become these bio filters  that clean up the air during physical exercise. And our plants in this sense  seem to be not too much affected by this. Weimar has actually a fine-stout  problem. But yeah we as you see as I've shown the systems we we tried to build  are basically quite closed and with a little bit extra tinkering or tape you  will probably seal it off. But then again it's our main focus was getting a  really comfortable home gardening system and then later on solve further  questions and problems. Thank you. Okay thank you. Plants and machines connect  gardens. You can connect to plant a machine on Twitter and Facebook. Okay  thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
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