Le 17/06/2020
Robotics: Data acquisition and automation for vineyard management
Vinescout is a 4 year research project funded by the European Union.
The goal of the project is to design a ground robot for vineyards: Vinescout is a robot that collects data that growers need to understand what is going on at the plant level.
For Vinescout, there are two main measures:
- To assess the vine vigor
- To measure water stress
But what farmers want is the information that help them manage properly irrigation and harvesting. Usually, this information is managed by the oenologist, because he knows the fields and soils differences. But with climatic uncertainty, they need to make sure they will have the right type of expected wine.
Vinescout is actually the second prototype and there is one year to go until the end of the project. The robot weighs around 100 kgs, moves at 1.2 km/hour, maps about 3.5 hectares/day, and works with 2 lithium batteries.
The ambition is now to reach high resolution with proximal sensing, depending on two different massive data: canopy temperature and canopy vigor.
Fransisco Rovira-Más, Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, presents the Vinescout project and its main challenges.