Robot Fleets, a Promising Future for Weed Control.

The integration of robots in industry today is a fact and there is no doubt that robotic devices could be of great use in agriculture. Indeed, in crop management, competitiveness requires increasing automation for reaching field processes that take into account the variability of the crops in both time and space. Although developments in other sectors are an important starting point, there are still major and specific research challenges to overcome in order to get efficient and less expensive tools that can have the potential of being transferred to the market. 

Given this context, the first part of this presentation will offer a brief but clear description about the different technologies that, under the research line of Precision Agriculture, have been designed and developed since 2000 at the Center for Automation and Robotics (CSIC-UPM).

In the second part, the European project RHEA will be introduced.  The RHEA (Robot Fleets for Highly Effective Agriculture and Forestry Management) project is devoted to change the traditional way of proceeding in agriculture by putting together a fleet of small, safe, reconfigurable, heterogeneous and complementary robots. Thus the RHEA project is focused on the design, development, and testing of a new generation of automatic and robotic systems for both chemical and physical –mechanical and thermal– effective weed management focused on both agriculture and forestry, and covering a large variety of European products including agriculture wide row crops (processing tomato, maize, strawberry, sunflower and cotton), close row crops (winter wheat and winter barley) and forestry woody perennials (walnut trees, almond trees, olive groves and multipurpose open woodland).  The presentation will analyze the main objectives and the current state of this project that involves 19 groups of 8 European countries (Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece).