The Multi-actor Approach focused on conducting five stakeholder events, four focus group interviews, and computer-assisted telephone interviews in three countries. These events allowed the consortium to involve stakeholders in defining system characteristics, analysing safety, legal, and economic aspects, and addressing upcoming EC Regulation implications. The participants concluded that WeLASER offers features in line with consumer expectations, but the future implementation needs to be cost-effective, have ample capacity, and be multifunctional.
The project developed a 2 µm-wavelength laser source that produce up to 507 W of continuous output power, which was one of the project's objectives. However, some technical issues related to the system's heat dissipation arose during constant use in the field. After improving these issues, the laser source can be marketed for agriculture or other industrial applications.
The weeding tool relied on two customised 0.5-m wide laser scanners to work on two crop rows, but to facilitate further commercialisation, it was dimensioned to tackle four crop rows (2 m) simultaneously. The final characteristics of the tool were those expected, but some limitations of the targeting appeared due to inaccuracies in the cameras and the scanners. Solving these technical problems will enable the commercialisation of the weeding implement as a standalone weeding tool.
A perception system was built using conventional hardware, and AI-based algorithms were developed for 1) crop and weed identification, 2) weed-meristem identification, and 3) meristem tracking. The hardware and algorithms were tested under laboratory conditions, achieving the expected indicators when the system is well-trained for the plants appearing in a specific field. However, it is well-known that AI-based plant identification is less effective for untrained agricultural fields. Therefore, a commercial device should have a strategy to retrain the AI algorithms for site-specific usage during the first year.
The autonomous robot was based on a commercial mobile platform improved with a new power system to provide the energy requested by the laser sources and chillers.
The smart navigation manager (mission planner and supervisor, robot guiding system, safety system, and human-machine interface) met the expected performance indicators. This system can easily be adapted to other commercial platforms, making it suitable for commercial exploitation.
Cloud computing is essential for the WELASER user interface and is the way to store the information acquired during the missions. The features tested in the field demonstrated that the system's performance was aligned with its intended functioning. This subsystem is ready to be commercialised with the smart navigation manager.
The IoT network provided information from the robot and the environment and achieved the expected features. A derived product is the E-fence, a camera system for surveying autonomous operations for human-robot collaboration and alerting about animal/human intrusions in fields. The E-fence is under a process for intellectual protection.
Most performance indicators regarding communication (newsletter, practice abstracts, website, social media, etc.) were achieved. Dissemination had lower indicators than expected (37% of journal publications and 73% of conferences). However, journal articles received more than twice the expected number of citations. In exploitation activities, the consortium managed to file two patent applications. The exploitation plan was completed for presentation to manufacturers and investors, to whom the systems and subsystems were presented in field days held in three countries.
