A student in the SUSU Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program developed a system for monitoring and controlling smart farms, which will record data from environmental sensors and transmit it to the user's smartphone. The team, consisting of a research supervisor and a postgraduate student of the Department of Information and Analytical Support of Management in Social and Economic Systems, entered the top 10 and received a monetary prize for participating in the program.
The active growth of the Earth's population and the even more active urbanization require rapid food solutions. One such solution is city farming—one of the most promising areas of agriculture, which involves placing farms for growing crops and raising animals in urban conditions. Specialists claim that the quality and environmental friendliness of products grown in this manner are much higher than that of analogues grown traditionally.
"Our system will allow the user to monitor plant health, control water and carbon dioxide levels, and control several types of LED strips to simulate the daylight hours remotely, using a mobile app. Several companies are currently developing control and monitoring systems for smart farms, but their systems do not have mobile Internet support. Our solution will make city farms more automated," explains Andrei Blinov, project author and postgraduate student of the Department of Information and Analytical Support of Management in Social and Economic Systems.
The Acceleration program for SUSU students was launched in September 2022. Around 300 students joined the program and created 60 entrepreneurial projects. Of them, only 10 finalist teams received monetary incentives. The SUSU Acceleration program was held within the Platform of University Technological Entrepreneurship federal project of the state program Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation. This year the project was aimed at developing youth technological entrepreneurship in the creation and promotion of innovative startups.
For the successful defence of the project, the development team received a grant from the Foundation on Innovations Facilitation for the amount of 500,000 roubles.
South Ural State University is a university of transformations, where innovative research is conducted in most of the priority fields of science and technology development. In accordance with the strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university is focused on the development of big scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of digital industry, materials science, and ecology. In 2021 SUSU became the winner in the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university acts as a regional project office of the World-class Ural Interregional Research and Education Centre (UIREC), which is aimed at solving the tasks of the Science and Universities National Project.