HORIZON EUROPE AIGreenBots Project: Artificial intelligence and sensor fusion systems in sustainable (green) robotics for precision agriculture

AIGreenBots is an MSCA PhD network that will implement interdisciplinary training, professional development and research collaborations for 11 researchers (i.e. DCs: PhD candidates), through an international and complementary partnership involving top universities, research institutions, agriculture-related stakeholders, “living lab” and “robot farm” infrastructures, and companies from different countries (PT, NL, UK, FR, ES), to provide tomorrow’s talent with the skills and knowledge to address one of the major challenges of our society and environment: agricultural robotics for precision/digital farming.

By engaging developing countries in a research-to-industrial exploitation paradigm, the AIGreenBots PhD-level training brings together academic and non-academic participants from different areas: robotics, automation, remote sensing for precision agriculture, trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) and probabilistic machine learning, systems engineering, probabilistic inference, sensor fusion, safety, and real-world deployment of agricultural robotics. Together, AIGreenBots will work with researchers to develop novel agrobot platforms (WP3), robotic perception and sensor fusion systems (WP4), trustworthy machine learning (WP5), decision-making under uncertainty (WP6), safety, and important aspects of legislation (WP7).

Currently, there are no doctoral training programs across Europe that focus on agricultural robotics and expose students to such broad concepts and knowledge, but there is a growing need for such research. Upon completion of the project, researchers will be fully capable of driving interdisciplinary research internationally. Therefore, the AIGreenBots framework will serve as a European platform for outstanding doctoral training in intelligent robotics for precision/automated agriculture and digital farming.