“Talking Trees” is an amazing project that is conducted, funded and powered by Insharp Technologies (PVT) Ltd which is a team of high-end software solution providers in Sri Lanka. Among all of the projects they carry out under their founder CEO Mr Rangana Samarasinghe, “Talking Trees” project takes up a very special place. The reason is that the objective of this specific research is to create a cloud-based platform for automation farming and the ultimate goal is to build up a model to understand and build up communication with plants. The “Talking Trees” is on a mission to implement the world’s largest social farming platform to bridge the communication between plants and humans to introduce fertilizer-free farming to the world.
The pathway to acquire the target and the reached milestones
Plants are living, breathing beings just like humans. They are capable of most of the living mechanisms that are exhibited by humans and other animals such as growth, reproduction, communicating with each other, responding to the environment they live in and learning as well as adapting. These facts simply lead to the point that the trees communicate. Meaning that the trees indeed do talk. Plants communicate in the form of chemical and electrical signals. These communicative interactions usually happen in the micro levels that cannot be detected by bare human eyes or senses.
The “Talking Trees” research team successfully surpassed two phases and is now thriving in phase 03. In this phase, the researchers use their knowledge and skill sets to acquire accurate electric potential (EP) signals of the plant Mimosa pudica. The reason to choose the plant Mimosa was the thigmonastic movements they show in the presence of external stimuli. This thigmonastic movement of the plant is rock-solid proof of the plant’s internal communication through the electric potential; variations as Action Potentials (APs) and Variation Potentials (VPs).
The Talking Trees researchers study the variation of these electrical signals inside the plant with various external environmental factors and other destructive and constructive forces toward the plants. To achieve readings regarding the above-mentioned electrical signals the external environment should be maintained with extremely controlled factors and the surrounding should be free of electromagnetic fields and fluctuations. To do this specific task, a special signal acquisition circuit and apparatus have been developed. Also to make sure the readings are indeed accurate to the last decimal fraction, the plant is placed in a calculated, controlled Environment box in which the environmental conditions are constantly and closely monitored and some factors are controlled manually to observe the different changes in the plant’s electric potential. To ensure the accuracy of these readings Talking Trees researchers have gone the extra mile and have placed the Environment box in a tightly controlled area.
What is this Environment box?
The Environment box was designed and developed by the Talking Trees team of researchers. The purpose of building this was to create a tightly controlled environment with the ability to manually control the conditions in it. Also, there are sensor modules to obtain readings when an experiment is going on. In addition, there is a unit to reduce external Electromagnetic field interferences occurring around the plant, in this case, Mimosa.
In this Environment box, the researchers can control and regulate the temperature, humidity, pressure, pH value of the soil & moisture, and light intensity. They have used sensors to obtain these measurements. In this box, there is a camera module integrated too. By that, the researchers obtain normal RGB visual data and thermal data of the plant inside the Environment box.
How is the data retrieved from the Environment box?
The controlled environment box remains closed while an experiment is in progress. So how do they retrieve this data? As we explained before, the internal or external communication of trees usually happens in the form of signals which are almost impossible for a naked human senses to detect. However, there could be some physically detectable changes too. To observe that the camera module records the whole experiment, live. Also, the test plant, Mimosa, could exhibit thermal changes with EP (Electric Potential) under several external stimuli. Both of these categories of data are recorded by the camera module that is integrated into the Environment box.
The external factors are measured by the sensors that have been integrated and the signals are also detected separately.
What is happening in phase 03?
Inside the controlled environment box, the light changes are done considering different intensities of Red, Green, Blue and white light. The electric potential signals are then measured with respect to the light changes. Both visual and signal data are retrieved and processed.
