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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
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Other partners: Iaac, (Spain), FEI (France), Inria (France), CNRS (France), UBER (Germany), Chatelain (France)
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Abstract: All over Europe, young farmers are starting small market farms and direct sales businesses. These farms can be found both in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. They grow a large variety of crops (up to 100 different varieties of vegetables per year) on small surfaces (0.01 to 5 ha) using organic farming practices. These farms have proven to be highly productive, sustainable and economically viable. However, a lot of work is done manually, resulting in physically challenging work conditions. ROMI will develop an open and lightweight robotics platform for these microfarms. We will assist these farms in weed reduction and crop monitoring. This will reduce manual labour and increase the productivity through advanced planning tools. Thanks to ROMI’s weeding robot, farmers will save 25 percents of their time. This land robot will also acquire detailed information on sample plants and will be coupled with a drone that acquires more global information at crop level. Together, they will produce an integrated, multi-scale picture of the crop development that will help the farmer monitor the crops to increase efficient harvesting. For this, ROMI will have to adapt and extend state-of-the-art land-based and air-borne monitoring tools to handle small fields with complex layouts and mixed crops. To achieve this, we will: (i) develop and bring to the market an affordable, multi-purpose, land-based robot, (ii) develop a weeding app for this robot that is adapted for organic microfarms, (iii) apply advanced 3D plant analysis and modelling techniques to in-field data acquisition, (iv) integrate these analysis techniques in the robot for detailed plant monitoring, (iv) integrate these techniques also in the aerial drone N-E-R-O for multi-scale crop monitoring, (v) extend the robot with novel, adaptive learning techniques to improve sensorimotor control of the plant monitoring app, and (vii) test the effectiveness of our solution in real-world field conditions.
Inria International Partners
Informal International Partners
Laboratoire International Associé (LIA): Computing Plant Morphogenesis
The focus of this LIA headed by Teva Vernoux (RDP) and Ottoline Leyser (SLCU) is on plant morphogenesis i.e. the mechanisms allowing the generation of plant shapes at different scales. Both the RDP and SLCU Laboratories are leaders of this field. The scenario for morphogenesis that has recently emerged is that chemical signals controlling cell identities lead to changes in mechanical properties of cells, triggering changes in shapes feeding back on the gene regulatory network. This in turn affects the distribution of chemical signals and mechanical forces, thus channeling morphogenesis. However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics). Understanding morphodynamics requires a modeling environment for the explicit representation of forms at multiple scales and for incorporating complex data from different origins and nature (chemical, mechanical, geometrical). In addition to creating a unique scientific environment, this LIA will gather the critical mass and interdisciplinary expertise required to create such a computational platform and to generate the data to produce an integrated vision of how chemical and mechanical signals interaction drive morphogenesis.
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