Project ROMI, RObotics for MIcrofarms

by Marco Sanalitro     Posted on August 31, 2017

The Fab City Reseach Lab at IAAC, together with its Pan-European Consortium, have won the Horizon 2020 funding for the project ROMI – RObotics for MIcrofarms.

The main goal of the project, which will be carried on at Valldaura Labs under the direction of Jonantan Minchin, is to develop an open and lightweight robotics platform for micro-farms, to assist farmers in weed reduction and crop monitoring. ROMI’s weeding robot will reduce manual labour and increase the productivity through advanced planning tools, allowing farmers to save 25% of their time.

This land robot will also acquire detailed information on sample plants and will be coupled with a drone that acquires more global information at crop level. Together, they will produce an integrated, multi-scale picture of the crop development that will help the farmer monitor the crops to increase efficient harvesting.

The winning team, coordinated by the Fab City Reseach Lab at IAAC, brings decades of experience at the forefront of the intersection between agronomy, robotics and data science, and are recognised as world leading in our application of new approaches to subjects such as plant modelling, adaptive learning and high-performance computing.

The Fab City Reseach Lab at IAAC is the operational body of the Fab City project, which aims to develop locally productive and globally connected cities. It is one of the four departments underpinning the entire IAAC structure together with other areas such as the Advanced Architecture Group, the Project for the Self-Sufficient City and the Barcelona Urban Sciences Lab.

Our Partners:

- Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, Sony, UK

- France Europe Innovation, FEI, FR

- Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique, Inria, FR

- Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS, FR

- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, UBER, DE

- Pépinières Chatelain, Chatelain, FR

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years, which promises breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market.

By coupling research and innovation, Horizon 2020 is helping to achieve this with its emphasis on excellent science, industrial leadership and tackling societal challenges. The goal is to ensure Europe produces world-class science, removes barriers to innovation and makes it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation.