Between the 7th and 10th of June, the first official competition dedicated to agricultural robots was held in Montoldre, France. ACRE, acronym for Agri-food Competition for Robot Evaluation, was developed and designed as part of the Horizon 2020 METRICS project, under the supervision of an AIRLab research group coordinated by Prof. Matteo Matteucci from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano.
The competition aims to increase the use of robots and artificial intelligence in the agricultural sector, and was organized in collaboration with the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of the University of Milan in partnership with the French institutions Institut national de la recherche agronomique and Laboratoire national de métrologie et d'essais.
The first edition of ACRE was expressly dedicated to weeding, given the environmental, social and economic benefits that robots, even low-cost ones, can determine in this area, providing an alternative to – or at least a drastic reduction in – the use of chemicals. During the competition, the robots performed various specific tasks such as distinguishing weeds from crops, moving autonomously in the field and finally the actual weeding. The performance of the robots was evaluated according to rigorous scientific criteria to measure the results in an objective and repeatable manner.
The event that just ended in Montoldre proved to be very useful to researchers, who benefited from this opportunity to share the data collected in the field, and to companies, which had the opportunity to showcase their products to potential buyers and investors. Part of this data will be made public next autumn to allow new teams to better prepare for future editions.
The French event represented a sort of “warm-up” for the next edition, which will take place in May 2023 in Cornaredo (Milan), Italy, at the Cascina Baciocca farm, with the involvement of a wide range of companies operating in the world of agricultural robotics, from “smart” farmers to agricultural equipment manufacturers.
The main purpose of the Italian edition will be to bring the Italian agricultural machinery industry closer to expert researchers in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, in order to create strong partnerships that will allow to fill the present gap, in terms of agricultural robotics, between the European industry and the US one, and similarly between the Italian one and that of other European countries such as France and the Netherlands.
