Looking at his newly calibrated system care for fragile blooms through the biting cold, 2024 undergraduate Zhao Shuaiming felt a deep sense of accomplishment.
As winter approaches, an ongoing student-led project dubbed “Four-Season Plant Guardians” is shifting the management of outdoor nursery beds over to an autonomous tech stack. The initiative bridges hands-on horticulture with artificial intelligence, creating a closed-loop learning environment where students shepherd the same batch of plants across changing seasons.
From Outdoor Soil to Indoor Smart Nurseries
The “Four-Season Plant Guardians” project operates in a continuous annual loop managed through the Bochuan AI Challenge Plan. During the spring, summer, and autumn months, students handle traditional cultivation duties like planting, watering, pruning, and daily observation out in the college nursery. But as frost threatens the region, the workflow pivots.
Students relocate cold-sensitive flora indoors into the college community’s innovation and entrepreneurship center. Once inside, the plants are plugged directly into a custom-built smart care apparatus designed entirely by the undergraduates. When spring returns, the potted flora heads back outside to the open-air beds, turning a single plant’s life cycle into a year-round educational framework.
The technical core of the project relies on a three-tier “perception-decision-execution” loop. At the perception level, environmental sensors monitor soil chemistry, air humidity, and ambient light. The decision layer processes these multivariate readings through machine learning algorithms before a local control program runs safety checks. Finally, the execution layer triggers physical hardware like water pumps, cooling fans, and specialized grow lights.
Real-World Testing on Campus Flora
Before deployment on nursery flowers, the student team tested their automation architecture on small tomato crops. Expanding the project to winterizing flora forces the software and hardware components to adapt to environmental stressors.
"What changes are the scenes and methods of labor, but what remains unchanged is the original intention of educating people by always accompanying the same batch of plants and solving real problems," Wang stated.
