Food computer
Food computers are meant to grow food. See also 3D food printing.
The Food Computer “creates a controlled environment using robotic control systems and actuated climate, energy, and plant sensing mechanisms. Not unlike climate-controlled data centers optimized for rows of servers, FCs are designed to optimize agricultural production by monitoring and actuating a desired climate inside of a growing chamber.” Cited by IEEE Spectrum, 1/2016
“The combination of open sourced digital plant recipes, open technology platforms, and the IoP will lead to the democratization of food production enabled by massive communities of users.” (Hapert & Siller, 2015:27)
“[The] next agricultural revolution will be based on interconnected open food production platforms (food computers) to increase production either by scaling up or scaling out and sharing data to form a new kind of network, the Internet of Plants (IoP). This new Internet is a digital-plant-recipe-centric network.” (Hapert & Siller, 2015:24)
Food computing can be compared to 3D printing. “Harper, of the MIT Media Lab, also plans to let users share recipes. Imagine buying a pack of tomato seeds, and then downloading the instructions to grow them. Your personal food computer would follow these instructions, and perhaps you could tweak settings to customize the tomatoes to your tastes.” This Desktop Farm Is Like A 3-D Printer For Fresh, Natural Food, July 2015.
Links
MIT OpenAG:
Other:
- Adrian L Lu's Food Computer Blog reporting an ongoing project (2015/16).
- This Desktop Farm Is Like A 3-D Printer For Fresh, Natural Food
Bibliography
- Harper, C.; Siller, M., "OpenAG: A Globally Distributed Network of Food Computing," in Pervasive Computing, IEEE , vol.14, no.4, pp.24-27, Oct.-Dec. 2015, doi: 10.1109/MPRV.2015.72, PDF (?)