The goal of the EU project “Robot Fleets for Highly Effective Crop Management in Miditerranean Agriculture (RHEA)” is to develop a system for the precise and automatic management of agricultural land by using a fleet of autonomous land and air vehicles. This includes the development of

• new computer vision algorithms for crop evaluation and weed management,
• innovative algorithms for decision-making modules,
• novel actuators for precise, real-time herbicide and fertilizer sprayer,
• a fleet of mobile units, consisting of both autonomous air and land robots
• new Human-machine interfaces and
• new strategies for re-planning missions.

The main contribution of the CVL is to develop new algorithms for the unit guidance of the autonomous land robots as well as crop and obstacle detection.

The RHEA project will be performed as subcontractor in cooperation with:

• Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
• CogVis GmbH
• Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien
• Cyberbotics
• University of Pisa
• University Complutense of Madrid
• Tropical
• Solutions for Precision Agriculture
• Technical University of Madrid
• AirRobot
• University of Florence
• Research Group Cemagref – SupAgro
• Case New Holland
• Bluebotics

Publications

M. Hödlmoser, C. Bober, M. Kampel – “Vehicle Guidance Implemented on a Single-Board Computer” – In Proc. of the 1st Conference on 3D Imaging, Modeling, Processing, Visualization, Transmission (3DIMPVT’11), Hanghzou, China, May 2011, to appear.

Project details

• Website: http://www.rhea-project.eu