1/4/2013
So you’ve tried to grow your own plants, but not with great success or perhaps you have dozens of plants in your garden, but a few have thrived while others haven’t. Experts say that it is most likely related to how frequently or how much you water them. A group of graduate students at the University of Illinois is working on a solution. The product, called Plant Link, could automatically detect when a plant needs watering and, in some cases, water it for you.
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So you’ve tried to grow your own plants, but not with great success or perhaps you have dozens of plants in your garden, but a few have thrived while others haven’t. Experts say that it is most likely related to how frequently or how much you water them. A group of graduate students at the University of Illinois is working on a solution. The product, called Plant Link, could automatically detect when a plant needs watering and, in some cases, water it for you.
The Plant Link process starts with two metal leads in the soil, which sends an electrical signal. That signal is given a value and transmitted back to a base station that the customer plugs into his home router. The result is then sent to the Oso website, which transfers it into an algorithm to determine whether or not a plant needs to be watered. The customer will have entered the type of plant next to the link, which will be used to make that determination. Currently, Oso has information from 300 different types of plants, but will use the next phase to survey potential customers and likely increase that database to the thousands.
From there it sends notifications to the customer’s home phone or laptop through text messaging, e-mail or push notification.
Plant Link is the maiden project for a startup company called Oso Technologies. The team includes Eduardo Torrealba (pursuing an MS degree in mechanical engineering), Austin Lyons (MS 2011, Electrical Engineering), Bradley Sanders (MS 2012, Electrical Engineering), Trevor Hutchins (pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering), and Michael Clemenson (pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering). The team formed in September 2011 and has moved quickly in developing the product and pursuing support.
The genesis of the idea came from Torrealba, who combined his passion for entrepreneurship in engineering and his desire to solve a real world problem.
“My wife got a basil plant from her dad,” Torrealba explained. “It kept getting worse and worse and we couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. We looked into it further and found that we were watering it incorrectly. I tried to buy something that would monitor the moisture level properly, but there was nothing on the market that did that. I figured I wasn’t the only person that was having this problem.”
In founding Oso Technologies, named for the Spanish word for bear, the mascot of Baylor, where four of the five had done their undergraduate work, the students took advantage of the professors, resources and infrastructure within the University of Illinois to pursue the project.
That includes the University’s Technology Entrepreneurship Center. That center provides lectures in Engineering Entrepreneurship for 200 students each year and annually attracts 300-500 more through the annual Cozad New Venture Competition designed to encourage students, researchers and community members to create new sustainable businesses. It also sponsors the $30,000 Lemelson Illinois Student Prize to help fund student start-ups, many of which, including Oso, are housed at EnterpriseWorks in the University of Illinois Research Park.
“Our mission is to provide students and faculty members with the skills, resources and experiences to be successful innovators and entrepreneurs, to tackle grand challenges and change the world,” said the center’s assistant director, Jed Taylor.
“One afternoon we all met for dinner in the basement of the Illini Union,” Lyons explained. “Eduardo pitched us his idea of trying to build a soil moisture monitoring system. He had hacked together a really simple prototype and asked if we wanted to help build a better one. We all had unique skills to bring to the table and it sounded like fun, so we agreed to give it a go.”
“The connections and support from the University to develop this company wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t decided to go to grad school at Illinois,” Torrealba said.
“We realized how well we worked together,” added Hutchins. “Although we started the company around this product we said, ‘Let’s be smart about this and make sure we’re not limited to this idea alone.”
Through support from places such as EnterpriseWorks, the Champaign County Community Development Fund and individual ‘angel’ investors, the team has had to supply very little of its own money out of pocket for the project.
Oso Technologies worked with various agricultural programs at Illinois and some around the world in correlating water tension and water saturation for different kinds of plants. Sanders took the lead in taking those results as well as tapping databases from the United Nations agricultural best practices to create an algorithm that would correctly determine how much water each plant would need.
Lyons built the Plant Link website, which allows users to log in and see if they need to water any of their plants. Torrealba, meanwhile, led the group to create the prototype, which started out as a larger wired device and has since been streamlined into a smaller wireless mechanism.
The product began as a crude proof of concept, but the team then moved to some better materials and worked with a local product design firm to improve the product’s look and feel. Then they developed a miniaturized version.
As incentive for investors, pledges of $100 are good for the base station and three links, while one for $150 also includes the valve component.
The future of Oso Technologies goes way beyond Plant Link. It is just the beginning of what General Electric calls the “industrial internet” or the “internet of things.”
“Our initial ideas are spinoffs of what we are currently doing,” Hutchins said. “There is a huge demand for just collecting data. We have all this data, but what do you do with it next?”
“The data could allow us to make better decisions or make those decisions for us,” Torrealba said. “The information we collect could be given to municipalities to determine when they need to have watering restrictions or reward customers who have been watering at the right times by giving them a break on their utility bill. There are a lot of possibilities that wouldn’t exist without that kind of connected data-driven decision making stuff that’s happening now.”
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Contact: Eduardo Torrealba, Founder and CEO, Oso Technologies, 817/937-7043.
Emily Lyons, Oso Technologies, 512/925-6055.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Mike Koon, writer/editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-1256.