Francisco Rovira-Más from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and Agricultural Robotics Laboratory in Valencia, Spain presented a webinar on Wednesday, March 13,14:00 CET (UTC + 1).
The VineScout robot operating in a vineyard.
A video of the webinar is available at this link [192 MB].
Talk details.
Title: VineScout Project: Enabling Big-data for Vineyards with Ground Robots
Another view of the VineScout robot.
Abstract: The wine industry is strategic for Europe, both economically and socially speaking. Its competitive position in the global market depends on the long-term reputation of its wines, which needs many years to be built, but can be lost quickly with a poor wine. The risk of losing reputation is high when repeatability cannot be granted, which happens ever more in the vineyards where manual data sampling is meager due to unaffordable costs. Therefore, our aim is to industrialize, demonstrate, and take as first ones to market an innovative expert field monitoring system (decision support system) embedded in a small-size and cost-efficient robot for the vineyard, which will be the follow-up of the successful EU-funded project VineRobot that ended in 2017. In order to ensure commercial success, VineScout tries to optimize both the external design and the internal electronics, with especial attention to the industrialization of the navigation and mapping software, the platform weather protection, and the robot’s user friendliness. For this, we count on an industry-driven consortium, targeting one of the largest agricultural sectors in Europe.
Supplementary/Reading Materials.
The VineScout website has deliverables and relevant publications posted.
Biographical Information.
Francisco Rovira-Más, webinar speaker on March 13, 2019.
Francisco Rovira-Más received a degree in Agricultural Engineering in 1996 from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, where he was an Assistant Professor from1997 to 2000. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA. He has been a member of the Intelligent Vehicles System group at the John Deere Technology Center in Moline, IL, USA. He has also been a Research Associate with the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering in the University of Illinois, conducting research at the John Deere Intelligent Vehicle Systems unit (formerly Agricultural Management Solutions –AMS) in Urbandale, IA, USA. Currently, Francisco is a Professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, founder and director of the Agricultural Robotics Laboratory, and Head of the International Programs Office at the School of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ETSIAMN). His research interests include Autonomous Vehicles, Machine Vision, Controls, Stereoscopic Vision, Off-road Equipment Automation, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence.