Robots in the Fields: Directions Towards Sustainable Crop Production
ICRA 2020 Keynote Talk by Cyrill Stachniss
International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Paris, 2020
Abstract:
Food, feed, fiber, and fuel: Crop farming plays an essential role for the future of humanity and our planet. We heavily rely on agricultural production and at the same time, we need to reduce the footprint of agriculture production: less input of chemicals like herbicides and fertilizer and other limited resources. Simultaneously, the decline in arable land and climate change pose additional constraints like drought, heat, and other extreme weather events. Robots and other new technologies offer promising directions to tackle different management challenges in agricultural fields. To achieve this, autonomous field robots need the ability to perceive and model their environment, to predict possible future developments, and to make appropriate decisions in complex and changing situations. This talk will showcase recent developments towards robot-driven sustainable crop production. We will illustrate how certain management tasks can be automized using UAVs and UGVs and which new ways this technology offers. Among work conducted in collaborative European projects, the talk covers ongoing developments of the Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob - Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” and some of our current exploitation activities.
