Remote Autonomous Plant Sensing for Space Exploration Enabled by Wearable Printed Electronics

In order to meet the food requirement of nutrient and safety for astronauts in long space missions, it is important for researchers to develop a way of cultivating fresh green vegetables in space. Great progress has been made to achieve plant growth in space, such as the development of Veggie unit by NASA. However, the present plant growth experiments in space require substantial human effort and do not afford detection of plant health condition remotely and autonomously. Moreover, simple inspection of plant conditions is insufficient for identifying the specific stress a plant is enduring, especially at the early stage. We propose to develop “smart” plant chamber that self-optimizes environmental conditions to reduce plant stress. The “smart” chamber is further capable of identifying desired crop traits for selecting stress-tolerant varieties. We will achieve so by developing light-weight, flexible and stretchable wearable sensors for plants based on the printed electronics technology. We will develop chemical sensors that transduce the invisible plant chemical signals into electrical signals for wireless communication with environmental control in the plant chamber. We will further invent advanced strain sensors that can continuously monitor plant growth over the lifetime of plants.

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