SMART Platform reveals the valuable data of plant growth

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research 1:30 SMART Platform reveals the valuable data of plant growth

By:

Lee Friesland

25 Jul 2025 238

Researchers at the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) Innovation Center are using Spatially and Mechanically Accurate Robotic Table (SMART) Platforms to study the life cycle of plants. Ph.D. student Praveen Gajula in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences is using the SMART Platform system for his research utilizing beneficial microbes to enhance crop productivity. The SMART Platform was developed by the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, Virginia.

My research is based on how we can use beneficial microbes to improve plant productivity. These plants are grown in soilless conditions. So there are no natural microbes within the substrate. So my research is to implement or to add microbial organisms. The smart table that we have at the IALR is specifically built and developed by the team at the Institute. It's a spatially mechanically accurate robotic table, so smart platform, moves on the XYZ axis. It's just imaging the plant's upper canopy over a period of time, and it's able to change the image from a RGB image, so red, green, blue, to a binary image, so we can confidently say yes, this is plant material, and no, this is not plant material, so you can see how much it grows or changes to those applied variables. The first goal for us is to identify the deficiency symptoms in the plant. For that, we have different nutrient levels applied to each plant. So once we are at the harvest stage, we are able to determine which nutrient level has shown the deficiency symptoms. I'm gaining experience on how to use the smart table and how to run the code, how to do the data analysis. that helped me in the future when I can do my own experiment.

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