Grant: Alliance Grants

Indoor farming relies on artificial light sources, called grow lights. Conventional grow lights produce heat and can damage plants. In order to address this issue, increase safety and reliability, and reduce energy consumption, grow lights based on Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are being introduced in vertical farming. LED lights can readily adjust the intensity and spectrum of light produced. Thus, they can provide superior performance for growing plants. Energy efficient LED grow lights can not only generate substantial revenue for the economy, but will also save energy and result in a cleaner environment. Vertical farming in urban areas can result in lower energy costs and increase profitability. In addition, the energy savings and safety improvements can result in sustainable modern farming. Thus, LED grow lights are at the heart of future developments in indoor farming. The success of vertical farming is hinged on the successful development of advanced LED grow lights. In this project, an advanced LED grow light will be designed and developed to precisely "engineer" the light provided to plants. The main novel concepts include: 1) new electronics, which can precisely control the current through the LED strings and perform dynamic power boost; 2) new smart metalens design, which can provide intensity consistent light at the canopy level; and 3) new machine learning algorithms that can identify the plant type and optimize respective light attributes in order to optimize the plant growth.