Start-up Zordi founder Gilwoo Lee is a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Washington. She ambitiously pitched her AI automated hydroponics plan to investors even before completing her doctoral degree.
Gilwoo Lee co-founded Zordi in 2020 with Casey Call, the founder of vertical farming start-up Plenty. The harvested strawberries are already on the shelves at Wegmans supermarkets, and they are currently collaborating with farms in New Jersey and California for expansion.
Zordi's hydroponic system includes two types of robots. One is a scouting robot that uses AI base models to collect data on plant health, while the other is a harvesting robot that delicately picks and places fruits and handles other tasks.
Zordi's engineering team is located in the Boston suburbs, with farms in southern New Jersey and western New York. Zordi uses NVIDIA GPUs on both cloud and desktop to train AI models, analyze crop health status, assess fruit quality, and collect harvesting data.
Lee's goal is to deploy fully automated AI greenhouse systems globally, support local markets, reduce carbon footprints, and provide fresher, tastier sustainably farmed fruits.
Zordi integrates Nvidia's AI automation system for indoor hydroponic cultivation, parallelly developing production manufacturing and storage operations.
Nvidia Jetson robots achieve sustainable farming and energy efficiency.
Zordi builds AI models and robots to achieve large-scale sustainable agriculture. Zordi uses NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules to test collected sensor data and run its models to identify the health status of plants, flowers, and fruits, early signs of pests and diseases, water content, nutritional needs, and light and temperature management.
Lee states that the energy efficiency of Jetson and the low-cost, high-performance cameras provided by Nvidia are very appealing features for Zordi. Zordi installs multiple cameras on each robot to collect data. Jetson develops many low-cost cameras, allowing Zordi to use different cameras and provide better battery power management.
Zordi also hopes to address the global farm labor shortage affecting operations through scouting and harvesting robots, as fruits and vegetables are sometimes left unattended or completely unharvested.
Zordi is planning to scale its growing business to meet consumer demand. Facing labor challenges, Zordi anticipates doing more through AI and robotic automation.
Omniverse Isaac Sim and Digital Twins facilitate agricultural operations.
Zordi researches how to utilize AI to optimize indoor farming like industrial manufacturers. They use Nvidia Omniverse's Isaac Sim for simulations and Digital Twins to optimize operational systems.
The company reviews all data collected from robotic sensors, with the AI platform providing a real-time dashboard with spatial maps to view each factory in the facility, allowing for easy remote monitoring of production. Additionally, it analyzes plant health and provides crop care recommendations, enabling inexperienced farm operators to manage their farms like agricultural experts.
Zordi is researching the simulated growing periods for strawberries, cucumbers, and tomatoes, using this to expand into other farming categories. For strawberries or other crops, cleverly managing the farming system helps extend shelf life.
Lee believes the most important aspect is having an AI that can think, making decisions for farm management through extensive automation.
Simulations in Isaac Sim not only improve Zordi's harvesting performance but also allow for different tasks in other application scenarios. AI can recommend crop care decisions while robots handle the heavy lifting of farming. Zordi aims to create a fully automated AI farming system that makes harvesting fruits and vegetables simple and profitable.
This article discusses how Zordi utilizes Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin AI technology to innovate greenhouse hydroponic strawberry cultivation methods, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.