RBE Capstone Presentation: Antoinette Mavrotheris, James Flaherty, Dante Muzila, Jasman Deep Narang | Automating Plant Care with Robotics
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
RBE Capstone Presentation
Antoinette Mavrotheris, James Flaherty, Dante Muzila, Jasman Deep Narang
Automating Plant Care with Robotics
Friday, December 16th, 2022
3:00 PM
Abstract: Houseplants are a great way to bring life and color to a room. However, taking care of houseplants can be challenging due to the monotonous routine required from caregivers and the imprecise nature of watering. When surveying at-home growers, our team discovered that, surprisingly, people have trouble watering their plants; the majority responded that over/under-watering was the main reason their plants died. To help people improve health outcomes with their house plants, we designed and built the Flower Shower, an automated watering system that looks like and acts as a plant. Inspired by the design of continuum robots, the Flower Shower’s stem can elastically bend 180° in any direction, delivering water through a pump system to surrounding plants. Soil moisture sensors in each plant’s pot communicate to the system when soil moisture levels have fallen below a certain threshold, and initiate the watering process. Experiments show that the Flower Shower can successfully deliver water to surrounding plants based on soil moisture monitoring.