Abstract

With this talk we would like to welcome the new Director of the Agriforwards CDT —Professor Marc Hanheide

While full automation is considered often considered the holy grail in agricultural applications addressing labour shortages and unfavourable working conditions, the journey towards automation to date requires collaboration and co-habituation of robots and human workers in the field while already offering substantial productivity gains and improvements.

In this talk, Marc will be presenting some solutions and insights on robots working with and alongside humans in agricultural domains. Be this helping fruit harvesting, collaborating in logistics, or collecting data for increased farm intelligence and yield forecasting. Insights from a number of funded projects in the domain of strawberry production will underpin this presentation, covering aspects of safety, collaboration, and adaptation of robotics systems.

Marc will cover latest developments at the University of Lincoln on multimodal detection and tracking of people in agricultural fields, interaction design for agricultural workers, and long-term deployment and coordination of robotic fleets in soft-fruit production.