In CANOPIES, our goal is to develop a novel collaborative human-robot paradigm addressing the challenges of Human Robot Interaction and Human-Robot Collaboration in the unstructured highly dynamic outdoor environment of permanent crop farming (Agri-Food Area). Our approach will be demonstrated through an integrated system composed by farming robots and logistics robots with a real-world validation of two economically relevant agronomic operations within a tablegrape vineyard: harvesting and pruning. CANOPIES represents the first attempt to introduce a collaborative paradigm in the field of precision agriculture for permanent crops where farmworkers can efficiently work together with teams of robots to perform agronomic interventions, like harvesting or pruning in table-grape vineyards. Both operations require complex processes of perception, communication, shared planning in agreement, prediction of human intentions, interaction and action. But also, both agronomic operations should be done in real life conditions, that is, in changing illumination and cast shadows, changing agronomic situations, where the vine branches or grapes can make it difficult to harvest or prune in a safe manner, due to the robot physical proximity to the human, while operating in real time. CANOPIES ambition will be achieved by introducing: i) novel human-robot interaction methodologies for enhanced safety and coexistence, ii) novel human-robot collaboration methodologies for increased system adaptability and intuitive usability; iii) novel multi-robot coordination methodologies for improved scalability. CANOPIES impact will contribute to filling the current gap in the development of fully autonomous robotic solutions for permanent crops by introducing a novel concept of farming robots, where we leverage an effective interaction with the human workers to mitigate the greater complexity of permanent crops as compared with field crops.

On 1 June 2018 the European Commission presented to the Parliament and to the European Council the legislative proposals for the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy valid for the period 2021-2027 in order to pursue the objective of an agriculture capable of resisting changes (especially those of the market), which is sustainable, and which guarantees the vitality of rural areas through greater synergies with policies and the most incisive research and innovation initiatives by increasing the use of new technologies in agriculture, still not widespread throughout the EU, especially by small and medium-sized enterprises. In this regard, the project PARADISE, which fits within the GREEN ECONOMY specialization area, aims to study the development of peri-urban agricultural areas, in order to guarantee: i) an appropriate integration with the social and urban fabric, ii) a production process based on the paradigm of precision agriculture that is effective and respectful of the environment, and iii) an energy sustainability from renewable sources of the technological infrastructure to support the production process.

The goal of PANtHEOn is to develop the agricultural equivalent of an industrial Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to be used for the precision farming of large orchards of hazelnut. Our objective is to design an integrated system where unmanned robotics components move within the orchards to collect data and perform some of the most common farming operations. The information will be stored in a central unit that will integrate the data coming from the different robotic units to perform automatic feedback actions and to support the decisions of agronomists and farmers.

The NECTAR project is focused on control issues for networked robotic systems. In particular, the NECTAR project wants to investigate and develop innovative techniques for the control of networked and cooperative robotic systems, i.e., teams of autonomous vehicles that, in order to achieve a common goal, cooperate by exchanging information via a wireless communication. The project activities will be focused on the development of motion control techniques for a team of mobile robots that has to carry out coordinated missions both in an environment lacking of a communication infrastructure (or sensor network) and in an environment where these infrastructure are available.