A wall is enough and the vegetable garden is ready. Designing and building a smart greenhouse to grow vegetables at home; joined by this common goal a team of six electronic engineering students from Tsinghua University in Beijing and eight students from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information from Federico II worked together in the laboratories of the D.re.am FabLab (Design and REsearch in Advanced Manufacturing) of Città della Scienza. In more detail, the students are engaged in programming microcontroller boards for the construction of greenhouses for hydroponic walls. Safe, practical and not expensive, the hydroponic cultivation allows you to grow any type of plant without using the soil and that is why this is experiencing great success in urban centers.

“We are developing – explains Amleto Picerno Ceraso, coordinator of D.re.a.m FabLab – an intelligent system capable of self-regulating to feed small crops of vegetables suitable for daily consumption. Thanks to sensors and algorithms, the system is intelligent because it understands the nutritional needs, for example of salts and minerals, of the plants and it regulates their release in the greenhouse”.

The smart greenhouse prototype will be presented on the occasion of the Italy-China Innovation Week scheduled in Naples on October 22nd and 23rd. Central moment of a permanent program of cooperation between the two countries, the Italy-China Week of Science, Technology and Innovation is the largest European event of internationalization between the two countries. The 2018 edition will include the Sino-Italian Exchange Event (SIEE – XII edition) and the China Italy Innovation Forum (CIIF – IX edition), scheduled in Naples on October 22nd and 23rd, followed by the 24th and 25th October two thematic territorial focus in Rome and Cagliari. The event will be inaugurated in Naples on October 23rd in the presence of the ministers Marco Bussetti and Wang ZhiGang.

The workshop is the first result of the “Ci-Lam Joint Lab” (China-Italy Joint Lab on Advanced Manufacturing), a joint Italian-Chinese research and training laboratory focused on the themes of the Intelligent Factory created for the 2017 edition of the Italy-China Innovation Week held last November in Beijing. Signed on the Italian side by the University of Naples Federico II, the Campania Newsteel incubator and the University of Bergamo, and on the Chinese side by Tsinghua University and the China Sci-Tech Automation Alliance (Csaa – Chinese Industrial Automation Cluster which boasts over 60 companies), the Ci-Lam Joint Lab is part of a collaboration platform between the two countries on advanced manufacturing issues, in line with the programmatic actions of the “Industry 4.0 Plan” and the “Made in China 2025” plan.

Chinese students visiting Naples could also stop in Bergamo. The study visit program, under the coordination of the University of Bergamo, mainly provided for detailed visits to the laboratories of the engineering departments where the students were able to see with their eyes the applied research arising from the collaboration with the companies. In this sense, the visit also saw the participation of the associative and business community thanks to the works of the Kilometro Rosso technological district, the POINT start-up incubator and Cosberg, a world leader in automation solutions.