French services company Atos is coordinating an EU project to promote use of robotics in European agriculture. FlexiGroBots is a Horizon 2020 funded programme, and aims to encourage robot-makers, engineers and service providers to build and deploy multi-robot systems for the agri-food industry to support farmers in their daily work.

The programme aims to facilitate “agriculture 4.0”, the farming specific implementation of Industry 4.0, where robotics, AI and automation play a fundamental role in crop management and precision agriculture by addressing real-time decision making and monitoring needs. According to the FlexiGroBots programme however, current robotic systems are lacking flexibility as they are built to carry out very specific missions and are not able to handle other tasks nor cooperate with other robotic technologies, leading to a lack of ROI for farmers.

The FlexiGroBots project will run over 36 months with the aim of developing and validating an open platform which supports the creation of flexible and heterogeneous multi-robot systems that enable multi-robot cooperation and autonomy. Robots include UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles).

The FlexiGroBots programme is engaged in the development of a digital platform to support the use of robotics through three large-scale pilots across continental Europe.

The three pilots are: vineyards, which is being carried out in Spain; rapeseed fields, which is centred in Finland; and blueberry fields, which is divided between Serbia and Lithuania. 

The vineyards project aims to demonstrate the capacity and versatility of robots to perform different tasks in vineyards, contributing to the quality of grapes for wine production and to overall economic profitability.

The rapeseed fields project aims to demonstrate time-critical pest management and robotization of heavy machinery fleets in grassland management, while the blueberry fields aims to demonstrate the potential of robotic solutions – with advanced remote sensing techniques, deep learning and decision support – to grow blueberries.

Within FlexiGroBots, the Atos research and innovation group acts as the project coordinator, guaranteeing the execution of the planned activities and the overall monitoring and supervision of the project. Atos will help provide the architecture and requirement analysis, lead the reference architecture and synchronize the three pilots. It acts as a technical leader and main contributor in the development of robotic mission control center capabilities for the design, planning and supervision of heterogeneous multi-robot operations, including robotic services enabled by Computer Vision techniques and in geospatial data analysis. As a member of the International Data Space Association (IDSA), Atos also works on the development of data space enablers for the data management of an industrial data space tailored to the agricultural context, allowing secure data exchange across various stakeholders within the agri-food sector.

“This project fits perfectly with Atos’ objective to contribute to the digitization of European industries, including agriculture, through the development of innovative applications and services based on AI, data and trusted robotics”, said Daniel Calvo Alonso, Head of the ‘AI, Data and Robotics’ Unit in the Atos Research and Innovation department and coordinator of the FlexiGroBots project.