Development of Speaking Plant Approach Technique for Intelligent Greenhouse

The Research Center for High-technology Greenhouse Plant Production of Ehime University provides a seamless technology development to establish INTELLIGENT GREENHOUSE SYSTEMS (IGS). The core concept as the basis of IGS is ‘Speaking plant approach (SPA)’, which was originally proposed by Udink ten Cate et al. and Hashimoto who is a professor emeritus at Ehime University. The SPA concept defines that optimal crop cultivation conditions should be based on the physiological status of the plants. The first step of the SPA is to obtain physiological information from a living plant. As a successful example, a chlorophyll fluorescence imaging robot, which can be used to grasp theheterogeneous distribution of photosynthetic activity of tomato plants in a greenhouse, is introduced. The primary feature of this robot is the feasible design, automated simple operation and low-cost, for implementation in commercial tomato production greenhouses. In addition, it is also focusing on the development of postharvest management techniques to improve the fruit quality. Here, a study to investigate the effects of storage temperature on the color of tomato fruit would be briefly introduced.