Controlled Environment Agriculture and Bio-Automation Systems to Improve Plant Growth Methods in Space

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) systems have been developed through the years to improve the yield to cover the food demand as well as save resources like water, fertilizers, and the erosion of the soil. Furthermore, those systems can be simple to quite sophisticated giving the opportunity to common people to apply for their houses. Thus, new techniques and technologies are being developed by scientists to avoid starvation and improve the nutrient value of food. Moreover, those studies have brought tools for the conservation of green spaces and the design of buildings with vertical farms. For those reasons, the Center for Space Emerging Technologies (C-SET) presents a review showing the advances and applications of CEA methods that have been implemented in various regions where it is necessary to improve a traditional crop field, the field is infertile or arid, or a food business wants to be created, or it is necessary to study plants discarding the variation of the weather during the experiments, inspiring this review which is a compilation of the development of this field of study. In addition, it is expected to encourage scientists to research this advance in order to increase the number of possible solutions to avoid the scarce water source and the loss of fields by the city’s expansion plus future applications for space colonies where is the most hostile environment for the life. Finally, this study presents real scenarios where CEA is used, besides the conservation and space experiments also are mentioned.