An Automated Black Soldier Fly Farm using IoT and Computer Vision

Have you ever heard of the Black Soldier Fly? It's a remarkable insect that you might not have heard of before. The Black Soldier Fly is a small, harmless insect that has the potential to transform the way we manage waste and produce food. Black Soldier Flies have proven to convert organic waste into cheap and high-quality animal protein feeds and residue frass fertilizer (a mixture of digested biowaste, larval feces and chitin-rich exuviae) for soil enrichment while addressing the dual problem of mismanagement of biowaste and climate change. Therefore after discovering the benefits of these flies and realizing that people are using traditional approaches to rear them we decied to automate the whole rearing process by developing a system with the following fetures:

• Monitors and adjusts the environment conditions (temperature, relative humidity, lighting) in a Black Soldier Fly Farm to make sure they are conducive at each stage of the life cycle.
• Monitors and adjusts the environmental conditions of the organic waste substrate (moisture and oxygen content) to make sure that they are appropriate for larvae growth.
• Aerates the organic waste larval substrate which is currently a labor-intensive manual process.
• Monitors the health of the larva based on their activity and motion in the organic waste larval substrate through Computer Vision techniques.

Why? Because Black Soldier Fly Larvae is difficult to rear due to its sensitiveness to atmospheric conditions such as temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, pressure and lighting hence rearing them in a natural environment may sometimes lengthen the lifecycle as well as affect by-products of each stage.