Project description
Increasing the versatility of agricultural robotics
In an effort to enhance agricultural production, agricultural robots are being increasingly adopted. The number of discreet tasks to be automated, however, significantly reduces the flexibility of current solutions, thus impacting efficiency and limiting their take-up. The EU-funded FLEXIGROBOTS project aims to develop a platform that will help build heterogeneous multi-robot systems, allowing for vastly improved flexibility by using existing robots for multiple tasks. This could help produce higher-value data from a variety of sources and sensors, increasing operational autonomy and precision while greatly reducing costs and encouraging investment in robotics.
Objective
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.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetinternet of things
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
28760 Tres Cantos Madrid
Spain