Flexible robots for intelligent automation of precision agriculture operations

    Project: EU project

    Project Details

    Description

    Agricultural robotics solutions can integrate a variety of robots for a variety of monitoring and targeted intervention tasks, to increase farm productivity, efficiency and sustainability through support of automated precision farming operations. Despite the rising farmer investment in farm/agricultural robots, most deployable robotic systems are meant to automate only specific tasks. The wide variety of tasks that need to be fulfilled in a single precision agriculture operation or mission makes it extremely unprofitable to address its automation with task-specific robots. These challenges result in a lack of flexibility of current heterogeneous multi-robot systems that poses low returns on investment and high risks for farmers. In order to become cost-effective, heterogeneous multi-robot systems needs to become more flexible by employing more versatile (e.g. multi-task) robots which collaborate to accomplish complex missions; ensuring scalable human oversight and intervention through adaptive mission control mechanisms (e.g. without information overload /overwhelming effort from the farmer); allowing the farmer to profit from robotics operational data. FlexiGroBots proposes a Platform for developing heterogeneous multi-robot systems and applications which allows for i) more versatility by using the same robots for different observation and intervention tasks, in different missions, throughout the crop life cycle, ii) more cooperation between heterogeneous (ground and aerial) robots to accomplish more complex missions; iii) more valuable data to generate accurate insights into the fields, crops and robotics operations by combining data from IoT sensors, satellites and data collected by the robots; iv) more autonomy for real-time adaptation of mission plans as well as robot behaviour at the crop level, given operational conditions and real-time insights; v) more precision to carry out specific tasks in a very localized way, gaining accuracy and lowering costs.
    AcronymFlexiGroBots
    StatusFinished
    Effective start/end date1/01/2131/12/23

    Collaborative partners

    • VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
    • ATOS IT Solutions and Services Iberia (ATOS) (lead)
    • Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
    • Seresco S.A.
    • Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
    • Bodegas Terras Gauda SA
    • Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
    • BioSense Institute
    • UAB "ART21"
    • Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke)
    • Mtech Digital Solutions Oy
    • Probot Oy
    • International Data Spaces E.V. (IDSA)
    • Agrosmart SIA
    • AgriFood Lithuania
    • Zeleni hit d.o.o.

    UN Sustainable Development Goals

    In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This project contributes towards the following SDG(s):

    • SDG 15 - Life on Land

    Funding category

    • EU-H2020

    Keywords

    • H2020-EU.2.1.1.
    • Automatized Rapeseed Pest Detection and Management with Drones

      Kaivosoja, J. (Corresponding author), Ronkainen, A., Hautsalo, J., Backman, J., Linkolehto, R., Emeterio, M. S. & Soininen, J. P., 2023, ROBOT 2022: 5th Iberian Robotics Conference - Advances in Robotics. Tardioli, D., Matellán, V., Heredia, G., Silva, M. F. & Marques, L. (eds.). Springer, p. 427-437 (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Vol. 590 LNNS).

      Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

      1 Citation (Scopus)