Blue Radix, an independent Dutch AI-tech specialist for the international greenhouse industry, and Ecoation Innovative Solutions, a Canadian developer of automated greenhouse management and crop health monitoring technologies, have signed an agreement.
The collaboration aims to identify new ways to automate decision-making and action in the greenhouse, using vision technology and algorithms. ecoation and Blue Radix are using the data collected by ecoation’s OKO and platform to enhance the impact of Blue Radix’ algorithms for autonomous growing. By combining data sets, algorithms, and analytical efforts the companies are able to create new insights and applications that help growers worldwide to improve their crop strategy, quality, and yield.
Blue Radix and ecoation look forward to ongoing collaborative efforts where the duo explores the multitude of innovation opportunities that become available when you combine ecoation’s OKO and platform with Blue Radix’ Crop Controller. Collaborating across data and algorithms has the potential to create value across many avenues, including optimizing crop strategy, autonomous steering, IPM enhancement, and understanding spatial climate distribution.
Autonomous find & fix solution
The first project the duo is working on is enhanced autonomous growing with crop data visualization. ecoation’s OKO collects sensory data and information about climate, integrated pest management, and crop work at every row and post to an SqM granularity. These insights greatly contribute to a complete and accurate view of the state of the crop. The broad range of data points, including fruit count, fruit coloring, and stem density, will be combined with the smart steering algorithms of Blue Radix’ Crop Controller. Crop Controller will actively, continuously, and autonomously control the greenhouse conditions with the grower’s crop strategy as its starting point and the optimal crop status as its goal. For example, by optimizing the plant load, plant stress is reduced avoiding weak plants that are vulnerable to pests and diseases. In this way, ecoation and Blue Radix find and fix imperfections before they impact yield or crop quality.
Support growers
“Collaborating with Blue Radix means pioneering the future of ag more effectively, at a pace that would be difficult to reach if we carried on separately,” shared ecoation CEO Dr. Saber Miresmailli. “Both teams are committed to the same goal: to support growers in making the best possible decisions. Working together means unlocking new ways to get the most from the data and providing better insights to our customers that inform their decisions.”
“Ecoation offers solutions which are important components in a fully autonomous greenhouse. Optimization and steering with algorithms depend on high-quality data and a robust crop strategy. Vision technology and enhanced analytics from ecoation provide this data and the necessary input to improve the grower’s crop strategy even further,” emphasizes Blue Radix CEO Ronald Hoek. “We strive for open collaboration and partnerships. Growers should always be able to choose freely what they want to do with their data and benefit from the best combination of services & products for their greenhouse.”
The duo will only work with greenhouse data retrieved from the customers of ecoation and Blue Radix who provide full consent. Transparency and data security is paramount, and this collaboration will rely on growers who are looking to optimize their greenhouse operations with autonomous processes and are interested in contributing to the future of ag with their facility data and insights.
Blue Radix
www.blue-radix.com