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Flexible robots for intelligent automation of precision agriculture operations

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.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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IA - Innovation action

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-ICT-2018-20

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Coordinator

ATOS IT SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES IBERIA SL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 579 817,00
Address
ALBARRACIN 25
28037 MADRID
Spain

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Region
Comunidad de Madrid Comunidad de Madrid Madrid
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 026 250,00

Participants (16)

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