By 2030 over 9 billion people, along with animals raised for food or kept as companions, will need to be fed generating inconsistencies between the demand and supply of food resources and promoting food insecurity by rendering food as unavailable, unaffordable, unevenly distributed or unsafe to eat. Therefore, food security represents the big challenge of the 21st century and in that context one promising potential sustainable solution is insect farming. The mass rearing of insects for food and feed holds great potential as it allows the production of rich proteins at large scale saving tons of CO2 emissions and requiring many times less water and land in comparison to other agricultural processes. Insects represent excellent bio-converters that can be used to recycle agricultural waste streams into valuable proteins and fertilizers.
CoRoSect addressed the dramatic need to gain a sustainable supply of food resources through insect farming with new robotic and digital solutions for the automation of insect farming, which is a critical point stressed by the Technical Expert Consultation on Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in Assuring Food Security. To provide insect farmers with robotic automation solutions that scale with their businesses, CoRoSect formed a novel integrated cognitive robotic and digitalized ecosystem where repetitive but also cognitively and physically demanding tasks requiring increased manual effort or continuous human supervision during the insects’ lifecycle, are replaced by automatic robotic-based procedures. The provided solutions draw upon research performed on understanding biological, technical, legal, ethical, and economic requirements of insect rearing. Focusing on real insect rearing problems, CoRoSect technologies have been evaluated extensively through pilots in 4 insect farms placed in 4 European countries rearing three of the most commonly occurring species, Mealworms, Black Soldier Flies, and Crickets.
