Digital Twin technology to accelerate underwater farming

Today, I am excited to share some information about an inspiring project where technology can create things that we didn't even consider to be doable or to have a significant impact. It is an example of thinking outside the box, combining human imagination, ingenuity, technological innovation, and, I guess, a great ambition to make things work. Nemo’s Garden, the first project of its kind, has one bold goal: to create an alternative agriculture system, specially dedicated to those areas where environmental conditions or morphological reasons make plants growth extremely dif?cult. The team has successfully harvested a variety of crops from its prototype biospheres and discovered that plants grown in this environment are nutritionally richer than those grown traditionally. The next big hurdle in achieving their goal was to turn this prototype into a solution that could be deployed globally; however, they didn’t want to wait another ten years to make that happen.

Today, Siemens Digital Industries Software announced that Nemo’s Garden had deployed Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio of software and services to shorten its innovation cycles and move more rapidly towards industrialization and scale.

A comprehensive digital twin of the Nemo’s Garden biosphere has been built. It encompasses its design evolution and enables simulation of the growing conditions within it, the impact of the equipment on the body of water, and the entire environment in which they are installed. The Nemo’s Garden team is no longer limited by weather conditions, seasonality, short growing seasons, or limitations on diving and monitoring. Adaptations to the biospheres can be tested in the virtual world, enabling the team to refine the design at a massively accelerated rate.

Existing video of the growing cycles and reference data from traditional farming operations of the same target crops at various growth stages and health conditions was analyzed using Siemens’ MindSphere? service. From this, Siemens was able to train a machine-learning algorithm to monitor plant growth and the environmental conditions within the domes.

When this algorithm is deployed onto Siemens’ Industrial Edge computing devices in each biosphere, the plants can be monitored via a cloud-based dashboard throughout the season, from anywhere, in real-time. Next season, these Industrial Edge devices will be connected to actuators – to automatically adjust air circulation, humidity, irrigation, and nutritional dosing throughout the whole season. This will be the foundation of a global agricultural service optimized for subsea operations and tuned for each of the world’s oceans. Read the full article here.

As probably by now, many will ask: why subsea agriculture? Watch this 3 min video.

So how do you find this idea of subsea agriculture? Feel free to express your opinion by voting here or in the comments.