  The AlphaGarden is an automated testbed for indoor polyculture farming which
combines a first-order plant simulator, a gantry robot, a seed planting
algorithm, plant phenotyping and tracking algorithms, irrigation sensors and
algorithms, and custom pruning tools and algorithms. In this paper, we
systematically compare the performance of the AlphaGarden to professional
horticulturalists on the staff of the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract Greenhouse. The
humans and the machine tend side-by-side polyculture gardens with the same seed
arrangement. We compare performance in terms of canopy coverage, plant
diversity, and water consumption. Results from two 60-day cycles suggest that
the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists
in terms of coverage and diversity, and reduces water consumption by as much as
44%. Code, videos, and datasets are available at
https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/systematiccomparison.
