Arboroot - Automated Greenhouses

An automated greenhouse that grows fruits, vegetables, and flowers using AI and can be remotely monitored with our website and mobile app.

Fresh, 100% pesticide free produce is hard to come by. The Environmental Working Group’s data analysis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration found pesticides in more than 70% of non-organic fresh produce sold in the U.S. However, buying organic produce is 21% more expensive than non-organic produce, as shown by a study done by CNET. A lack of affordable health foods leads more people to consume cheap junk-food, which in turn, contributes to the obesity epidemic in our community. This especially effects low income households where price is a barrier to fresh foods and food deserts where location is a barrier to accessing fresh foods. According to the USDA, approximately 17.4% of Americans live in low-income communities without a supermarket within 10 miles.  

Moreover, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global temperatures are likely to rise above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold by 2050. The agriculture industry is responsible for 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions, as shown by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Growing fruits and vegetables at home is one of the best ways to produce fresh food at a lesser expense from money and the environment. However, try your hand at gardening, and you will find the popular pastime is time consuming and laborious. According to the National Gardening Association 2021 Survey, gardeners responded the main reason they could not garden more was from lack of time. Thus, time is a crucial factor when individuals determine whether growing their own food is feasible. Additionally, a large percentage of produce sold at traditional supermarkets comes in single use plastic packaging or bags, increasing the toll that the agriculture and food distribution industries play on our environment. 

In our industrialized society, almost all Americans rely on a complicated food supply chain to keep themselves fed. Disruptions to the food supply chain caused either by natural disasters or targeted attacks could have catastrophic rippling effects. 

Our automated greenhouse system optimizes plant growth and minimizes the amount of consumer work. It uses a drip irrigation system to dispel the need for the tedious task of watering plants, which is 15-25% more efficient than traditional sprinkler systems. We will also make fertilizer-pods that can be inserted into the irrigation system to fertilize the soil while watering. Our greenhouses use solar panels + batteries and collects rainwater to be fully self-sufficient in case of a natural disaster. Furthermore, the greenhouses protect the plants from animals and insects, eliminating the need for pesticides and other harmful chemicals that gardeners and farmers in large agricultural companies are forced to use. Each greenhouse has a small 3ft by 6ft footprint, and our modular design allows combining multiple greenhouses for a seamlessly interconnected larger garden with independent climate zones. 

In addition to our greenhouses, we offer seed-pods: mini biodegradable seed planters containing fertilizer to help the plant germinate. Users can add the pod to the greenhouse by scanning it with our app. We will also license the pods to third-party companies as a cheaper option for the customer. Our greenhouses will still work with any type of seed, as long as the user manually selects the plant from the database with the app. 

Our website and mobile app include a drag-and-drop grid to place each plant. By either scanning their seed pod or manually selecting the seed, users choose a free spot on the grid to place the plant. Our AI algorithm will then specify how much water the grid-location will receive and update the optimal temperature based on our backend database and weather APIs. Even in extreme environmental conditions or long remote vacations, our consumers can remotely monitor their greenhouses from our website or mobile app and adjust if need be. 

One of the best parts of our automated greenhouses is that they are easy to use, making a great introduction into the world of gardening and sustainability for novice gardeners. Gardening is an enjoyable and rewarding hobby for many people, but requires a high level of knowledge, skill, patience, and even luck to have a successful harvest. Our solution minimizes the barrier of entry to gardening, allowing users to focus on the pleasureful and relaxing aspects, while the technology deals with the boring repetitive tasks and automatically creates an optimal environment for the garden to prosper. New gardeners can use our solution to start gardening without worrying about optimizations or sticking to a strict schedule. Experienced gardeners can customize their automation using their preferences and expertise to take advantage of the technology’s precision and repetition. 

Our solution also serves health-conscious individuals who desire fresh produce at an affordable cost. Since our greenhouses reduce the barrier to entry for a home garden, more people have the ability to grow fresh produce year-round in their backyards, reducing both accessibility and cost of healthy foods. Our temperature regulation allows for an extended growing season, bypassing seasonal price-hikes of mass produced produce. Additionally, temperature regulation can simulate tropical climate zones, allowing users to grow exotic plants (like avocado trees) all year round in most parts of the world. 

Our solution also addresses the problem of taking care of gardens while on vacation. Since the greenhouse is autonomous and self-sufficient, we estimate it can fully support itself for around three months without user intervention. Our website and app integration allows users to remotely monitor their plants and adjust automations as necessary. 

We also plan to use a portion of our profit to donate automated greenhouses to low-income communities and food deserts to make healthy food more accessible. 

The team behind Arboroot is made up of three high school juniors: Thomas Chen (enjoys programming and physics), Amith Polineni (loves robotics and philosophy), and Maribelle Chu (passionate about sustainability and engineering).

We are intelligent, hard workers, dedicated to bringing fresh food to every backyard through Arboroot. Through our rigorous schooling, we have developed a mindset of “if there is a will, there is a way.” We see challenges as learning opportunities. As Maribelle says, there are no bad days, just learning days. 

At our STEM-focused school, we are fortunate to be able to connect with peers who have startups and learn from them. In fact, we found this competition through a peer who won last year. Our teachers are also extremely knowledgeable and willing to help us in our journey by looking over code, checking electronic safety, and reviewing patent applications. We are grateful and humbled to be surrounded by helpful, brilliant individuals.

Thomas is currently working on a team for an AI project that will segment one dimensional infrared reflectance scans to identify the location of veins and arteries for improved OCT scans and diagnosis of disease types. He enjoys hikes and being outside in nature, which fuels his immense passion for Arboroot. 

Amith is an avid roboticist and web-developer and loves working in the intersection of mechanical engineering, programming, and network connections to servers/websites. He is also a part of the school’s ethics bowl team and will use his fine-tuned reasoning skills to help make better business decisions for the company. Amith and Thomas are nearly expert jugglers and practice learning new juggling tricks together. 

Maribelle is a computer systems administrator at our school and co-chair on the Youth Advisory Board for the Northern Virginia Science Center Foundation, organizing Earth Day, Robotic, and Physics events. The Northern Virginia Science Center Foundation has a vast network of companies and sponsors that Maribelle can access through her mentor. She is passionate about making the world a more sustainable place and contributes her business, communication, and problem solving skills. Maribelle and Amith are co-presidents of Team Tiny House, a school club dedicated to educating the environment through the designing and construction of a tiny house. 

All three members are multilingual, with a combined total of 7 different languages, for a competitive edge on global expansion and advertising. Our minds working together invites inspiration, ideas, and thoroughness. We are each determined to continue pursuing knowledge in STEM, increase sustainability, and make Arboroot a success. We are set on bringing fresh food to every backyard - Arboroot is the only way to transform our vision into reality.  

“If it doesn’t exist, just make it yourself.” 

The idea of an automated greenhouse came from our personal desires to grow a garden without the repetitive manual labor. Our first designs were based around these personal desires: we thought of things that would make our lives easier and designed a greenhouse around those constraints. We also made sizing prototypes to make sure tall people wouldn’t bump their heads on support beams and people with shorter arms could reach the full width of the greenhouse to access plants in the back row. We tested several sizing prototypes with friends and family and settled on 3 by 6ft as the perfect base size.  As we continue to make more functional prototypes, we plan to rigorously test them in our own backyards as well as expert gardeners in our community for more suggestions and optimizations.

Our product will be the first user-friendly automated greenhouses on the market. Existing indoor smart gardens (ISGs) only work indoors in the kitchen. They are unable to support large vegetable or fruit gardens due to size constraints, so consumers can only grow simple herbs or tiny vegetables. Our automated greenhouses are outdoors, and can therefore grow a larger variety of foods. 

Furthermore, ISGs that include an irrigation system have small water tanks requiring the consumer to frequently fill the reservoir, while our irrigation system is auto-replenished from rainwater collection. ISGs require constant electricity to power light bulbs that simulate an artificial sun or force the user to place it next to a window receiving less direct sunlight during the day. Our outdoor greenhouses benefit from direct sunlight for the full day, without wasting electricity to power an artificial sun. 

Existing ISGs are restricted to the user’s home temperature, which is suboptimal for the plant. On the other hand, our greenhouses can be regulated to an optimal temperature depending on the species of plant; our greenhouses can maintain a year-long growing season like ISGs, without the restriction of human-based indoor temperature. Temperature regulation even allows customers to grow tropical fruits such as avocados or bananas in their backyard in the middle of the United States. 

Some ISGs require expensive and proprietary plastic seed cartridges (almost like how printers require specific ink cartridges). However, our greenhouses technically do not require seed pods, and our seed pods contain biodegradable fertilizer, specific to each plant, to improve the user experience. 

Traditional outdoor greenhouses require constant maintenance and watering, which wastes space to allow humans to walk inside. Our automated greenhouses only require users to plant and harvest, giving plants more room. Optimizing plant growth with AI, using solar panels and rainwater collection for self-sufficiency, and combining greenhouses with modularity are unique aspects of our product.

Outdoor automated gardens could expand into a new industry with Arboroot at the center with an ecosystem of gardening robots and room for third-party integration (similar to smart home accessories). A competitive automated garden market will bring fresh foods to food deserts and low-income households. 

1. We will make a consumer focused automated greenhouse, filled to the brim with automation technology to ease the barrier to entry of home gardening. These greenhouses will increase access to healthy foods and make families more resilient to natural disasters or catastrophic food supply-chain blockages.
2. We will take a significant percentage of profits from the consumer greenhouses to donate larger automated greenhouses to food deserts all around the world. These donated greenhouses will be specially designed to operate without a consistent water supply and for maximum efficiency to get healthy food to the most people.

Our greenhouse uses a drip irrigation system to dispel the need for the tedious task of watering plants, which is 15-25% more effective at being used by the plant than traditional sprinkler systems. We will also engineer fertilizer pods that can be inserted into the irrigation system to fertilize the soil while watering. Our greenhouses use solar panels and batteries, allowing for greenhouse functionality during cloudy days. We also collect rainwater with gutters running to a water tank. Each greenhouse has a small 3ft by 6ft footprint, and our modular design allows combining multiple greenhouses for a seamlessly interconnected larger garden with independent climate zones. 

In addition to our greenhouses, we offer specially engineered seed pods: mini biodegradable seed planters containing fertilizer to help the plant germinate. Users can add the pod to the greenhouse by scanning it with our app.

Our website and mobile app include a drag-and-drop grid to place each plant. By either scanning their seed pod or manually selecting the seed, users choose a free spot on the grid to place the plant. Our artificial intelligence algorithm will then specify how much water the grid-location will receive and update the optimal temperature based on our backend database and weather APIs. Even in extreme environmental conditions or long remote vacations, our consumers can remotely monitor their greenhouses from our website or mobile app and adjust if needed. 

We are currently in the development phase and have not launched our solution. In the next year, we hope to build and sell 25 automated greenhouses as well as donate 1 large automated greenhouse to a food desert in our community (Northern Virginia). This will approximate to roughly 65 people who get easier access to healthy foods through purchasing a greenhouse and an additional 30 people in a food desert community that we support.

Although we are very passionate about our greenhouses, we are learning how to develop a successful and sustainable product as we go. We are all high-school juniors, and much of our engineering and business experience comes from free online resources (especially youtube explainer videos :). We don't have a large technical background, which slows our pace, but we're still working tirelessly with what we have. We also don't have any money - we may be able to raise a maximum of a couple hundred dollars from family which will cover basic prototypes and allow us to iteratively improve our design, but our current funding ability is insufficient for buying materials needed to engineer and ship multiple professional greenhouses. We also cannot afford a patent officer to assist us with patent filing, so we are handling the legal side of our business by ourselves, going slowly to avoid catastrophic mistakes.

We provide a reduced barrier to entry for home gardening and the ability to have affordable fresh produce grown suitability. We provide this in the form of our automated greenhouses and integrated management software to take care of repetitive gardening tasks with the use of artificial intelligence. We plan to sell the automated greenhouses to customers for a high upfront cost because it will save them money on affordable (essentially free with a fully self-sufficient greenhouse) produce for several decades to come. We will also offer an optional subscription service to remotely monitor the status of the greenhouse; we do not intend for most users to pay this continuously every month, but we predict users will periodically activate remote monitoring when needed (for example when they go on vacation). 

For enough funds to develop prototypes, set up an ecommerce platform, and start selling greenhouses, we plan to raise funds from grants, angel investors, competitions, and crowdfunding. We are aware of people in our community who wish to see sustainability become the norm, and we ask them to invest in our startup. Additionally, with the use of our social media skills, we will crowdfund. Lastly, we will apply for sustainable technology grants such as Seedfund run by the U.S. Government; Global Impact Awards by Google; and the Center for Health, Environment & Justice Grant. 

Once start steadily selling greenhouses, we will use revenue to improve the manufacturing process and reduce costs. We will also charge an optional monthly subscription for the ability to remotely monitor greenhouse status (for example when someone goes on vacation). Some users will pay for the subscription when needed while others will find the remote monitoring useful enough to continuously pay the monthly fee. A combination of new greenhouse revenue, recurring subscription revenue, and lowing manufacturing costs will make our business profitable and allow us to donate greenhouses to those in need.