Speakers

Agricultural Robotics & Engineering
University of Bonn

Talk title: Robotics and Robotic Vision for Precision Agriculture

Chris McCool is a full Professor at the University of Bonn and leads the Agricultural Robotics group. The work of his group is centered on robotic/computer vision to enable robots and autonomous systems to work in challenging environments (especially agriculture). Chris McCool received his PhD from the Queensland University of Technolgoy (QUT) in 2007 and has previously worked in the areas of biometrics/face recognition (Idiap Research Institute), environmental computer vision (NICTA) and agricultural robotics (QUT). He has a particular interest in applied image classification, computer vision, and pattern recognition.

Department of Plant Sciences
Wageningen University

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.

Institute of Geodesy and Geoengineering
University of Bonn

Talk title: Deep Generative Models for Agriculture

Ribana Roscher received the Dipl.-Ing. and Ph.D. degrees in Geodesy from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2008 and 2012, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Remote Sensing at the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation at the University of Bonn. Her research includes pattern recognition and machine learning specifically for agricultural and environmental science applications.

Department of Electrical Engineering
Technical University of Denmark

Talk title: Perception for Autonomus Weeding Robots in Grasslands

Lazaros Nalpantidis is an Associate Professor of Autonomous Systems and Robotics at the Department of Electrical & Photonics Engineering, in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). His research focuses on perception for autonomous systems, while agricultural robotics is a big part of his activities (e.g. EU H2020 "GALIRUMI", and EU ICT-AGRI-2 "DockWeeder" projects). Lazaros received his Ph.D. (2010) in Robotic Vision from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS), in the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Lazaros has organised conferences and workshops on robot perception and has served as editor and guest editor in various journals on robotics and robot vision.