VIRIDIIS – VertIcal gaRdens wIth DIgital twIn of plantS

Origin of funds: PRIN 2022

Amount Financed: € 292.000

Period: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025

Research topics:

Measurement group manager: G. Andria

Partners: Università della Basilicata, CNR

The aim of VIRIDIIS is creating a technological ecosystem that could support the natural one in an urban environment. VIRIDIIS will develop new green low-cost solutions with an integrated set of technological tools that will help in monitoring the health conditions of plants and, thanks to the application of artificial intelligence tools and techniques, will be proactive in showing critical situation by a comprehensive analysis of heterogeneous data coming from apparently uncorrelated sources (as pollution, weather conditions, sunlight, evaluation of produced oxygen by plants, images coming from both ground cameras and earth observation by satellites etc.). Sensor identification and characterization will be at the basis of the design and development of a suitable IoT architecture built around the “digital twin” of the plant.

The data collected and analysed by VIRIDIIS’s installations will be used to give a voice to the plants, providing a “conversational agent” to make people understand the health status of a plant by talking to them and to ask for possible countermeasures in bad situations. Of course, the overall technological infrastructure (made by physical/hardware elements and information-based/software ones) will not be possible without the optimal knowledge of the relevant characteristics of the agricultural domain. In the project, a multidisciplinary approach is needed to combine, in a single technological ecosystem, knowledge coming from experts in sensors, IoT architectures and infrastructures, data analysis and artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, knowledge of plants.