The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed “PlantCopter”, used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.

植物周围的微气候对其健康和光合作用过程产生重大影响，其中某些植物在环境欠佳以及湿度和温度不平衡的情况下苦苦挣扎。远程跟踪和关联当地环境条件对植物健康生长的影响的能力可能对提高植物成活率和增加农业产量产生重大影响。这就需要在每个植物的表面上广泛分布轻质感官设备。我们使用灵活且生物相容的材料，再加上智能紧凑的设计，以实现低功耗，轻巧的系统，我们为工厂开发了广泛部署，自主且合规的可穿戴设备。演示的可穿戴设备集成了温度，湿度和应变传感器，并可以紧密部署在任何植物的软表面上，以远程连续评估最佳生长设置。通过同时检测环境条件，同时定量跟踪增长率（即伸长率），可以实现这一点。最后，我们建立了以自然为灵感的折纸组装而成的3D打印“ PlantCopter”，用作我们可穿戴设备的发射平台，从而能够在大范围内进行广泛的微气候监测。