ECMR 2021 Workshop on Agricultural Robotics and Automation

Objectives and Information

With the world population projected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, changes in crop production using new technologies and artificial intelligence will play a key role in meeting rising food demands and improving environmental sustainability. Recent years have seen impressive advances in the area of agricultural robotics: robots are increasingly being used in applications such as crop phenotyping and monitoring, weed control, fruit picking, targeted spraying of pesticides and fertilisers, and more. These exciting scenarios incite new challenges for research and innovation in different robotic fields, including perception, motion planning and control, manipulation, learning, and decision-making, which must be tackled to improve the capabilities of autonomous systems in challenging farm environments, both in outdoor field and glasshouse conditions. A key aspect of research problems in autonomy for agricultural robots is their interdisciplinary nature that spans both robotics and agricultural sciences.

This workshop focuses on recent advances in agricultural robotics and automation. The objective is to bring together researchers and practitioners to share ideas and approaches enabling robotic systems in agriculture. The workshop will offer an overview of the state-of-the-art through a series of invited and contributed talks, and discussions among participants will be encouraged to exchange knowledge, brainstorm new ideas, and envision the future of this field. In particular, emphasis will be placed on fostering the link between robotic platforms and domain-specific knowledge from plant sciences for real-world applications.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not necessarily limited to:

• UAV-based remote sensing and crop monitoring

• Machine vision and deep learning for precision agriculture

• Mobile manipulation

• Sensing in precision agriculture

• Aerial and ground robotic platforms for agricultural applications

• Long-term autonomy and navigation

• Multi-robot coordination and applications

• User interfaces and human-robot interaction for end users

• Adaptive sampling and informative planning