Atlas City Project

The unit is xxx mtrs long and 3mtrs wide, 2 rows of standard warehouse racking are bolted to a concrete floor, in the gap between the racks is the track for a robot to move along the rack as well as reach from top to bottom of the rack shelves (like an automated warehouse), polythene is draped over the racking and secured to the ground to create a greenhouse, at one end of the greenhouse there is space for the robot to pick up or deposit(saved) seed, pick up boxes for harvested crops and deposit harvested crops for removal by other machines.
Each rack has 4 or 5 shelves containing either hydroponic or airponic growing systems.
The robot does all planting and harvesting under the control of a computer with vision capability and which knows what and when to plant crops, monitors the health of all plants individually and harvests them at the right time which may be on demand or before the next crop is planted.

Sooner or later the polythene can be replaced with toughend glass.



We could have fish tanks on the concrete and airponic veg on the rack shelving.

we are definitely planning to have cool stuff like this involved with the city.

to me, I just love the efficiency and high production volumes created by these types of set ups

thanks for sharing.

best start small and test things out. Theses systems are not as easy to get running as they look.

You will be there to help us Andrew

This is very close to what I was thinking of for Atlas. We should do it in a building that we can add levels to for future expansion.

isenhand, you are absolutely correct. it will take trial and error to get our systems going correctly, and the larger the system, the longer and harder it will be to get working correctly. That is always something to keep in mind.

It is clear that I did not explain my idea clearly enough, it is designed as a small system that can be extended as demand and finance allows.

Warehouse racking is about 4mtrs long, you start with two of these racks parallel to each other with a 1mtr aisle between them for a warehouse type robot to perform all work, moving along all racks, reaching from ground to top shelf, cheap polythene covers both racks to form a greenhouse, hydroponic or airponic growing trays will be placed on three or four rack shelves each side of the robot aisle, additional racks can be added as required, increasing the length of the greenhouse to hundreds of metres if necessary, still using a single robot, later the polythene can be replaced with glass.
Tanks for fish can be placed on the concrete floor beneath the racks.

Very impressive. Love it.

1. Its simple and low cost materials. Good old wood and polyethylene.
2. Look scalable both horizontally and vertically.
- i assume they are germinating outside though. We still need bees to do the cross pollination ?
3. The Fish aspect is to provide for the Nitrogen cycle. The excrement from the fish.
- i read about this on another farm where they also incorporated algae production to make fuel too.

Harvesting on a robotic level can also be applied to this simple process is they wished too.
The plants would have to be sitting in a template cage. so they can be lifted out of the hydroponics shelves to be processed.

Its a really nice system and i bet the fish taste better than the massive steroid farmed fish