UrbanNest
From concrete to crops—automated, sustainable terrace farming for modern sustainable cities.
Created on 18th April 2025
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UrbanNest
From concrete to crops—automated, sustainable terrace farming for modern sustainable cities.
The problem UrbanNest solves
Urban areas face escalating challenges in food security, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience due to rapid urbanization, pollution, and inefficient resource management. Key statistics and pain points include:
🏙️ Underutilized Terrace Spaces: In India, a large percentage of urban households don’t leverage terrace spaces for productive use like farming.
🧪 Health Risks from Chemically Treated Produce: Urban populations largely consume pesticide-laden food, contributing to weakened immunity, hormonal imbalances, and chronic illnesses.
🌳 Lack of Green Spaces & Local Food Systems: Cities are rapidly losing their green cover while relying heavily on distant, unsustainable supply chains.
UrbanNest addresses these issues by transforming urban rooftops into AI-powered organic farms, reducing reliance on external food sources while improving community health and sustainability.
Challenges we ran into
While building UrbanNest, our team tackled a variety of technical and conceptual challenges:
⚙️ Sensor Integration Issues: Calibrating multiple sensors (CO₂, pH, soil moisture) for consistent real-time readings was tricky. We overcame this through firmware updates and environment-specific threshold tuning.
🧠 AI Plant Disease Detection: Achieving reliable plant health diagnostics using mobile camera feeds was difficult due to varied lighting and plant stages. We mitigated this by training our CNN on a diverse, augmented dataset with OpenCV preprocessing.
🔋 Solar Panel Optimization: Getting servo-controlled sun-tracking to function accurately with live weather updates required fine-tuning algorithms for motion thresholds and weather data smoothing.
🔌 Real-time Data Sync: Ensuring smooth communication between sensors, Firebase, and the dashboard was a hurdle. We resolved latency issues by optimizing Firebase listeners and restructuring API calls.
📱 User Experience Consistency: Making the dashboard responsive across devices and browsers involved deep testing and Tailwind-based UI refactoring.
Every roadblock sharpened our solution—and brought us one step closer to a fully autonomous, smart farming system for cities.