ROBOT

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE CHALLENGE: Accurate crop monitoring, and precision agriculture are of greater importance for a grower to transition towards regenerative farming, but with larger fields in southern Europe (e.g.: Spain), it gets increasingly challenging. Water is scarce during dry spells and is supplied by the local bodies in a rationed manner, only during specific times, and on-farm storage facilities are limited. Hence, farmers use intensive irrigation methods (e.g., flood) in an effort to save the crop. Pest disease monitoring rely on green experts that are scarce and technological solutions are still not mature. Thus, most of the growers find crop monitoring a cumbersome task, and resort to preventive and excessive application of chemical pesticides, severely impacting soil health and biodiversity. The harvest decisions are subjective as well due to which the growers lose sale opportunities when there is excess production and pay a penalty to the retailers if they produce lesser than what is contracted.

THE SOLUTION: ROBOT aims to develop an autonomous robotics-based crop monitoring platform that acts as a decision support for the growers, to help growers optimize their crop management decisions, resulting in reduced usage of water, chemical pesticides, and labor. Within the EIT Food project, the partners will integrate their proven technologies and implement a fully validated crop monitoring platform in blueberries.

An autonomous field robot that can scout for water demand, pest and disease infestation levels using soil sensor data, and cameras respectively as well as data transfer infrastructure to the backend and analytics system via edge devices will be carried out by Aigro. Fermata will focus on the high throughput image processing model, while Yield Computer will perform the analytics and advisory platform to generate heatmaps and alerts on water demand, pest and disease infestations, and harvest volumes. Finally, LUT will conduct the environmental and economic impact assessment.

IMPACT TARGETS to be achieved by 2028:

• Reduced water usage by 10%

• Reduced costs on scouting, pesticide and nutrient usage by 6%
• Reduced usage of preventive pesticides by 90%
• Improved soil health and biodiversity
• Improved supply chain position
• Improved profitability by 15%