Abstract

Abstract

Crop farming is essential in our society, providing food, feed, fiber, and fuel. We heavily rely on crop production, but at the same time, we need to reduce the production footprint. We aim to address this key challenge by investigating new solutions to produce crops more sustainably. We study novel technology-driven approaches to move toward sustainable crop production. Agricultural robots offer promising directions to address management challenges in agricultural fields or support plant breeding efforts through large-scale trait acquisition. For that, field robots need the ability to perceive and model their environment, predict possible future developments, and make appropriate decisions in complex and changing situations. This talk will showcase our recent developments in robotics for crop production, incorporating machine learning to support farmers in operating more sustainably and reducing some negative impacts on the ecosystem.

Bio

Cyrill Stachniss is a full professor at the University of Bonn and heads the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab. He is also a Visiting Professor in Engineering at the University of Oxford and is with the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Before his appointment in Bonn, he was with the University of Freiburg and ETH Zurich. Since 2010, he has been a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. From 2015 to 2019, he was senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob” at the University of Bonn, together with his colleague Heiner Kuhlmann. His research focuses on probabilistic techniques as well as learning approaches for mobile robotics, perception, and navigation. The main application areas of his research are autonomous service robots, agricultural robotics, and self-driving cars. He has co-authored over 300 publications and has coordinated multiple large-scale research projects on the national and European levels. Besides his university involvement, he cofounded three startups: Escarda Technologies, DeepUp, and PhenoInspect.