Agricultural Collaborative Robot Inside IoT (AGRICOBIOT)

This project aims to develop an autonomous collaborative platform able to assist the operator in his daily work inside a greenhouse, allowing to maintain the traceability of the tasks performed by the human and the robot, resulting in an improvement in terms of work safety, food safety and sustainability. The robot must be able to transport material inside the greenhouse, from defined stations to the human operator. For this purpose, two tasks will be distinguished: the navigation of the robot inside the greenhouse and the interaction with the human operator, so that the worker can move freely near the platform minimizing the risks for the human, the robot and the crop. In order to achieve a global optimum, in terms of sustainability, the robot must be able to communicate with other agricultural machines. To this end, the robot will implement the recent ISO 11783 standard for communication between electronic devices in agricultural machinery. Also, in order to take advantage of the interoperability benefits offered by the “Internet of Things” (IoT), the  experience in the FI-WARE platform will be used to provide the system with a feature that will allow the farmer to know at all times and in real time the status of the greenhouse and the workers (amount of product harvested, crop areas worked, vehicle status, …). In addition the robot can be equipped with sensors to acquire information about the state of the greenhouse and the crop, in order to use this information in its displacement or to share it with the farmer in real time. The key element of the proposed work architecture is the robot. For this reason, and taking into account that there is currently no development that meets the required needs, the main focus of this project will be the design and manufacture of the mobile platform, leaving the rest of the system as work for a future project.