AeroFarms and Nokia Bell Labs have unveiled a multi-year partnership to combine their expertise and expand their joint capabilities in cutting-edge networking, autonomous systems, and integrated machine vision and machine learning technologies to identify and track plant interactions at the most advanced levels.
As part of this partnership, AeroFarms, a global leader in indoor vertical farming, contributes its commercial growing expertise, comprehensive environmental controls, an agriculture-focused data platform, and machine vision core foundation.
Nokia Bell Labs, the world-renowned industrial research arm of Nokia, contributes its groundbreaking autonomous drone control and orchestration systems, private wireless networks, robust image and sensor data pipelines, and innovative artificial intelligence (AI) enabled mobile sensor technologies. This combination of innovative technologies allows AeroFarms to reach the next level of imaging insights that further enhance its capabilities as an industry leading operator of world-class, fully connected smart vertical farms that grow the highest quality plants all year round.
AeroFarms and Nokia Bell Labs have been working together since 2020 and have reached an important milestone of achieving a proof of concept for this state-of-the-art integrated system and testing the technologies with AeroFarms’ current commercial crop varieties. Together, they are now ready to scale this system to all of AeroFarms’ crops and future indoor vertical farms, including the next ones in Danville, Virginia and Abu Dhabi, UAE.
The integration of Nokia Bell Labs’ AI-enabled drone-based sensors and advanced machine learning, computer vision and data analytics technologies with AeroFarms’ existing machine vision tools enhances and elevates AeroFarms’ position as an agriculture platform and capabilities organization dedicated to solving food and agriculture supply chain challenges.
David Rosenberg, CEO at AeroFarms
With Nokia Bell Labs, we have developed the next-generation system that can image every plant every day in a cost-effective way at scale. This level of detailed imaging and insights helps us be better farmers by monitoring our plant biology dynamically and allowing us to course correct as needed to ensure the highest level of quality all year round.
Roger Buelow, CTO at AeroFarms
AeroFarms’ expert team of plant scientists and engineers have been working together for two years with Nokia Bell Labs’ top researchers and engineers to train these complex learning systems with a nuanced understanding of plant biology.
