Speakers
Prof. Cyrill Stachniss
Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation
University of Bonn
Talk title: Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production
Cyrill Stachniss is a full professor at the University of Bonn and heads the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab. Before his appointment in Bonn, he was with the University of Freiburg and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. From 2015-2019, he was senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Together with his colleague Heiner Kuhlmann, he is a spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence "PhenoRob" at the University of Bonn. In his research, he focuses on probabilistic techniques for mobile robotics, perception, and navigation. The main application areas of his research are autonomous service robots, agricultural robotics, and self-driving cars. He has co-authored over 220 publications, has won several best paper awards, and has coordinated multiple large research projects on the national and European level.
Dr. Vito Trianni
Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies (ISTC)
National Research Council (CNR)
Talk title: Collaboration and Self-Organisation of UAV Swarms for Precision Agriculture
Vito Trianni is a senior researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR). He received the Ph.D. in Applied Sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2006, a master in Information and Communication Technology from CEFRIEL (Italy) in 2001, and the M.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2000. His research mainly involves swarm intelligence and swarm robotics studies, with particular emphasis on the design and analysis of complex self-organising systems and distributed cognitive processes.
Prof. Sven Behnke
Computer Science Institute
University of Bonn
Talk title: High-resolution in-field crop scanning
Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke holds since 2008 the chair for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Bonn and heads the Computer Science Institute VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics. He graduated in 1997 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Dipl.-Inform.) and received his doctorate in computer science (Dr. rer. nat.) from Freie Universität Berlin in 2002. In his dissertation "Hierarchical Neural Networks for Image Interpretation" he extended forward deep learning models to recurrent models for visual perception. In 2003 he did postdoctoral research on robust speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. In 2004-2008 Professor Behnke led the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group "Humanoid Robots" at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. His research interests include cognitive robotics, computer vision, and machine learning.
Dr. Grzgorz Cielniak
School of Computer Science
University of Lincoln
Talk title: Automated Phenotyping of Soft Fruit
Dr Grzegorz Cielniak is an Associate Professor at the Lincoln Agri-Robotics Centre, University of Lincoln, UK. His subject specialism falls within agri-robotics and includes robotic perception and navigation in unstructured outdoor environments, with a strong focus on robotic application delivery in agriculture. His research is multidisciplinary and crosses areas of computer science, engineering and agriculture. He is a holder of several funded grants for collaborative projects between academia and the agri-food industry. Grzegorz is a coordinator of the RASberry funding programme bringing together various funding sources to support robotic solutions for soft fruit production.
Prof. Christopher McCool
Agricultural Robotics and Engineering
University of Bonn
Talk title: Robotic Vision and Action: in agriculture
Prof. Dr. Chris McCool is a full Professor at the University of Bonn. He received his PhD 2007 from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. He has previously worked at the Idiap Research Institute and the National ICT Australia before he joined the Agricultural Robotics group at QUT in 2014. He was a key member in the development of two agricultural robots AgBot II and Harvey and joined the University of Bonn in 2019 to lead the Agricultural Robotics and Engineering group. He has a particular interest in applied image classification and their application to robots and autonomous systems that can use this information to take action in challenging environments such as agriculture.
Dr. Timo Korthals and Dr. Thilo Steckel
CLAAS Group
Talk title: Towards Autonomous Systems in Precision Harvesting
Dr. Timo Korthals (left) studied Electrical Engineering at Paderborn university and worked in the recent years as scientific staff at the Cognitive Interaction Technologies - Excellence Cluster (CIT-EC) at Bielefeld university. During his PhD candidacy, he worked with CLAAS on environment recognition projects and participated in numerous robotic competitions. Timo joined CLAAS in 2020 to work on the Agri-Gaia research project. His core activities are related to environment recognition, sensor processing and fusion, AI and robotics.
Dr. Thilo Steckel (right) studied Agricultural Sciences at Bonn University. After 2 years research in soil sciences and remote sensing he joined CLAAS and worked in research oriented areas all time. He received a PhD from Hohenheim University (Dep. Of Agricultural Technology). His core activities are related to agricultural process management, data management, AI and robotics. Furthermore he cares about research management within CLAAS and represents the organization in various technical committees on national and international level.
Dr. Gert Kootstra
Department of Plant Sciences
Wageningen
Talk title: Agricultural Robotics: dealing with the challenges of variation and occlusion
Gert Kootstra is assistant professor in machine vision and robotics at the Farm Technology group of Wageningen University. His group focusses on developing, applying and disseminating robotic technologies in the agro-food context. Gert received his PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Groningen in 2009 and studied object detection and robotic grasping at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm from 2009-2012. He then specialized in the application of robotics in agriculture and food production at Wageningen University and Research. Gert coordinates FlexCRAFT, a large Dutch research program, with the aim to develop flexible agro-food robots. He is furthermore involved in several national and international research projects.