Flexible Robots for Intelligent Automation of Precision Agriculture Operations

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.

The FlexiGroBots project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101017111.

Project website: https://flexigrobots-h2020.eu/

Project coordinator: ATOS IT Solutions and Services Iberia SL (Spain)

Project partners:

  1. Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas (Spain)
  2. AgriFood Lithuania DIH (Lithuania)
  3. Agrosmart SIA (Latvia)
  4. Biosense Institute – Research and Development Institute for Information Technologies in Biosystems (Serbia)
  5. Bodegas Terras Gauda SA (Spain)
  6. Centre for European Policy Studies (Belgium)
  7. International Data Spaces EV (Germany)
  8. Luonnonvarakeskus (Finland)
  9. Mtech Digital Solutions OY (Finland)
  10. Probot OY (Finland)
  11. Seresco SA (Spain)
  12. Teknologian Tutkimuskeskus VTT OY (Finland)
  13. UAB ART21 (Lithuania)
  14. Wageningen University (Netherlands)
  15. Zeleni Hit doo Beograd (Serbia)