Grow Tech Wall

What it does

Urban green walls are often aesthetic-only, costly and labour-intensive. GrowTechWall makes them self-sustaining by converting them into crop-growing systems by automating farming tasks with AI, robotics and IoT to cut labour and boost urban farming viability.

Your inspiration

While visiting a newly opened mall in Kuala Lumpur, we observed that many of its vertical green walls were already deteriorating, despite their premium design and cost. This highlighted a fundamental issue: green walls are often installed for aesthetics, yet require intensive maintenance and offer little functional value. That observation led us to ask, what if green walls could do more? What if they could grow food, manage themselves, and contribute to urban sustainability? As engineering students passionate about robotic system, we developed GrowTech Wall to transform decorative green panels into intelligent, self-sustaining vertical farms.

How it works

Grow Tech Wall is a smart vertical farming system designed to be fixed directly onto building walls, both indoors and outdoors. It transforms aesthetic green wall into a productive farm that grows leafy vegetables without soil. Using NFT hydroponics, nutrient-rich water flows through PVC channels where plant roots develop. A motorised rail system moves a robotic arm across the wall to automatically harvest crops, transplant new seedlings, and spray organic pesticide. An AI camera monitors plant growth and detects pests or disease, triggering automated responses. Smart sensors track water level, nutrient strength (EC), pH, and lighting. When conditions go out of range, the system self-adjusts by dosing fertiliser or balancing the water. Everything is wirelessly connected and controlled via a smartphone app. The modular design of the framing system allows it to scale easily up to demand, from homes to commercial buildings making farming in cities more accessible.

Design process

We began with a key constraint: the system had to mount on walls without adding much structural load. That ruled out soil and led us to adopt hydroponics, a lighter and cleaner method allowing precise nutrient control. We used NFT, where a pump feeds water to the top row and gravity distributes it downward, reducing energy usage. From the beginning, we designed for real users. The hydroponic layout and XY gantry are modular and scalable, customisable by size, spacing, and yield based on available wall space. We 3D-printed a robotic arm and integrated it with a compact sprayer and gripper. Through multiple design iterations, we reduced slippage and improved transplant accuracy. A seedling tray at the base enables the arm to replant immediately after harvest to ensure self-sustaining operation with minimal human input. To automate crop monitoring, we trained an AI vision model on thousands of plant images to detect growth stages and diseases, triggering precise robotic actions. To complete the system, we added grow lights, calibrated dosing pumps for fertiliser and phosphoric acid in the reservoir tank, and real-time sensors for EC, pH, and water level. A Wi-Fi app links all subsystems, making wall farming smart, simple, and accessible from anywhere.

How it is different

Grow Tech Wall reimagines the concept of green walls by transforming them from passive, decorative features into active, intelligent farming systems. Unlike typical vertical gardens that demand constant maintenance or hydroponic setups that are bulky and table-based, our design mounts directly onto existing walls, requiring minimal space and no soil. What sets it apart is its unique fusion of precision agriculture and compact automation. Most existing green wall systems either focus on aesthetics, require manual upkeep, or only offer automated irrigation. Grow Tech Wall closes the loop. It combines robotic harvesting, seedling transplanting, AI vision-based disease detection, and nutrient dosing into one seamless unit. With modular layout options and a user-friendly Wi-Fi app, it delivers a self-sustaining, low-labour farming solution bringing scalable, sustainable food production to the walls around us.

Future plans

We aim to improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale up for commercial deployment. This includes reducing setup time by automating plant position calibration using vision-based alignment, enhancing dosing precision with algorithm, and expanding our AI model training database to support more crop types and detect early-stage nutrient deficiencies. We are exploring lightweight materials and simplified frame designs to lower production costs while maintaining the structural strength. Field trials in real urban settings will validate performance, while our growing database will make the system more adaptable for diverse users and environments.

Awards