Description du projet
Les robots, nouveaux ouvriers agricoles
Depuis le début du XXe siècle, il y a eu de nombreuses tentatives de commercialiser le fruit de l’agriculture et d’accroître la productivité. Si la main-d’œuvre est le nerf de toute activité agricole, le développement de solutions technologiques efficaces axées sur les données et qui reposent sur la robotique et l’intelligence artificielle est essentiel pour assurer la pérennité de l’agriculture. Le projet CANOPIES, financé par l’UE, explorera un nouveau paradigme de collaboration homme-robot sur le terrain. Celui-ci sera confronté au cas concret des opérations de récolte et de taille dans les vignobles de raisins de table pendant une durée de quatre ans. Le projet démontrera comment une équipe de robots hétérogènes, certains pourvus de bras robotiques, d’autres dotés de capacités de transport, travaillera aux côtés d’ouvriers agricoles, ouvrant ainsi de nouvelles perspectives en matière de gestion des exploitations et des cultures.
Objectif
In CANOPIES, our goal is to develop a novel collaborative human-robot paradigm addressing the challenges of Human Robot Interaction and Human-Robot Collaboration in the unstructured highly dynamic outdoor environment of permanent crop farming (Agri-Food Area). Our approach will be demonstrated through an integrated system composed by farming robots and logistics robots with a real-world validation of two economically relevant agronomic operations within a table-grape vineyard: harvesting and pruning. CANOPIES represents the first attempt to introduce a collaborative paradigm in the field of precision agriculture for permanent crops where farmworkers can efficiently work together with teams of robots to perform agronomic interventions, like harvesting or pruning in table-grape vineyards. Both operations require complex processes of perception, communication, shared planning in agreement, prediction of human intentions, interaction and action. But also, both agronomic operations should be done in real life conditions, that is, in changing illumination and cast shadows, changing agronomic situations, where the vine branches or grapes can make it difficult to harvest or prune in a safe manner, due to the robot physical proximity to the human, while operating in real time. CANOPIES ambition will be achieved by introducing: i) novel human-robot interaction methodologies for enhanced safety and coexistence, ii) novel human-robot collaboration methodologies for increased system adaptability and intuitive usability; iii) novel multi-robot coordination methodologies for improved scalability. CANOPIES impact will contribute to filling the current gap in the development of fully autonomous robotic solutions for permanent crops by introducing a novel concept of farming robots, where we leverage an effective interaction with the human workers to mitigate the greater complexity of permanent crops as compared with field crops.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinateur
00154 Roma
Italie