Industrial Automation Magazine India

Atos coordinates European project FlexiGroBots to foster the use of robotics in agriculture

Published on : Monday 12-04-2021

The adoption of new technologies in the agricultural sector has increased in recent years, unleashing a new paradigm agriculture 4.0.

Paris/Madrid, April 2021 – Atos has announced it is coordinating and actively contributing to the European project “FlexiGroBots”. This initiative aims to empower robot-makers, engineers and service providers to build and deploy multi-robot systems for the agri-food industry to support farmers in their daily work. Within the framework of the Horizon 2020 program, the project will develop an innovative platform to facilitate the use of robotics through three large-scale pilots across Europe.

The adoption of new technologies in the agricultural sector has increased in recent years, unleashing a new paradigm: “agriculture 4.0” where robotics, AI and automation play a fundamental role in crop management and precision agriculture by addressing real-time decision making and monitoring needs. However, current robotic systems are lacking flexibility as they are built to carry out very specific missions and are not able to handle other tasks nor cooperate with other robotic technologies, leading to a lack of RoI for farmers.

The FlexiGroBots project will run over 36 months with the aim of developing and validating an open platform which supports the creation of flexible and heterogeneous multi-robot systems that enable multi-robot cooperation and autonomy. Robots include UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles).

Within FlexiGroBots, the Atos research and innovation group acts as the project coordinator, guaranteeing the execution of the planned activities and the overall monitoring and supervision of the project. Atos will help provide the architecture and requirement analysis, lead the reference architecture and synchronise the three pilots. It acts as a technical leader and main contributor in the development of robotic mission control centre capabilities for the design, planning and supervision of heterogeneous multi-robot operations, including robotic services enabled by Computer Vision techniques and in geospatial data analysis. As a member of the International Data Space Association (IDSA), Atos also works on the development of data space enablers for the data management of an industrial data space tailored to the agricultural context, allowing secure data exchange across various stakeholders within the agri-food sector.