Source: Vertical Farm Daily
In the wake of opening a new corporate headquarters in Richmond, VA in January, Babylon Micro-Farms received a $1M grant with the potential for $750,000 follow-on funding from the National Science Foundation to continue their development of BabylonIQ, an all-inclusive platform for powering decentralized, automated Micro-Farms.
The platform is designed to be hardware agnostic, in order to manage a wide variety of on-site farming products, and the insights and data from the Machine Learning and computer vision components present a critical ability for the platform to learn and optimize automatically over time. The results will be Micro-Farms with high yields, better flavor and nutrition, and a seamless user experience. In 2019 Babylon was awarded a $225,000 Phase 1 grant to begin scientific trials of the technology.
The objective was to use machine learning models to leverage NDVI and other image data to accurately and automatically capture metrics such as plant health and growth rate. The trials “allowed us to focus on more cutting edge, risky technologies that complement our remote management platform under the supervision of the National Science Foundation. The research demonstrated results promising for commercialization,” said CTO Graham Smith.