Recipient Organization
International Society of Precision Agriculture
109 East Main Street
Monticello,IL 618561968
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The demand for food is increasing but at the same time, consumers are demanding more nutritious food that is grown sustainably. These demands are compounded by the lack of labor availability to work on the farms and the negative impacts of climate on crops. Then, the advances in digital agriculture, especially sensors and controls, machine vision, and artificial intelligence applied to robotics and automation offer numerous possibilities to address many of the challenges faced in agricultural production and to increase the productivity and efficiency of farming operations. The proposed symposium will provide participants with the opportunity to exchange knowledge, identify promising technological advances, identify research and training gaps, identify infrastructure (e.g., communications, data interoperability) needed to realize the benefits of robotics and automation, and identify opportunities for collaboration. The symposium will serve as a knowledge hub where different groups will converge to exchange expertise and identify opportunities for multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration. Additionally, having the symposium running concurrently with the ICPA conference might provide participants of both events to build and strength professionalcollaboration that ultimately will benefit the applications of robotics and AI to precision agriculture.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Since the earliest commercialization of yield monitors and variable rate technology in the early 1990s, precision agriculture (PA) has struggled with the quantity of data to be analyzed, understood and acted on. To facilitate analysis and management, early PA researchers and developers aggregated data and decision making into grids or management zones for crops, and pens or grazing zones for livestock. As PA moves toward individual plant or animal management, grid, zone, and pen management will be obsolete. Robotics and automation would allow them to implement crop and livestock management at the same level of detail as their data. The challenge we face with the current development is that but most of the agricultural robotics being commercialized have very little decision making capacity. They mostly follow preprogrammed field paths. In crop farming, companies are starting to advertise artificial inteligence (AI) use in machine vision technology to target apply herbicides, in guiding fungicide application by predicting plant disease infestations and in helping combine harvester operators optimize machine settings. The agricultural sector has lagged behind other industries in embracing autonomous systems, robots, multi-sensor data fusion, big data analytics, and AI. The full realization of these technological innovations in agriculture now and in the future will require transdisciplinary collaboration efforts, development of solutions accessible to types of farmers and operations, implementation of real-time interoperability services, as well as training of the future workforce of scientists and users. The symposium we propose will provide a space where academia, industry, funding agencies, and other stakeholders can exchange knowledge on emerging trends and research and identify challenges and opportunities in the fields of automation and robotics. It will also serve as a forum to discuss opportunities for collaboration and to identify the governmental programs and infrastructure needed to realize the full potential of these innovations in agriculture.
Project Methods
We propose to hold a one-day symposium on July 22nd, 2024 which will run concurrently with the program of the 16th International Conference of Precision Agriculture (ICPA) which will take place in Manhattan, Kansas (July 21-24, 2024). The symposium will involve representatives of various stakeholder groups, in particular, university faculty from within and outside the USA, representatives from industry and farming communities, students, governmental funding agencies employees. The symposium will include a total of six sessions, with four covering various areas supporting robotics and automation innovations, one panel discussion session, and a poster session (robotics and automation abstracts submitted by ICPA conference). All the sessions will be recorded, and the recordings will be available to the general public on the symposium webpage housed on the ISPA website. The symposium will have invited speakers from academia (1862s and 1890s universities), industry, farmers, and governmental agencies who have made significant contributions and developments in the areas of robotics and automation or who are generating market opportunities for these applications. The conference organizers will contact some of the principal investigators of current USDANIFA or NSF's funded projects on Digital Agriculture or AI research institutes to present their work during those breakout sessions (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearchResult?ProgEleCode=132Y&BooleanElemen t=Any&BooleanRef=Any&ActiveAwards=true#results). It is expected that a total of 15 speakers will take part in the oral sessions (25 minutes per oral presentation followed by 5 minutes Q&A) and panel discussion. Because the symposium will run concurrently with the first day of oral presentations of the ICPA conference, the symposium's participants will be invited to attend the ICPA opening plenary speaker, and after the plenary session, they will be directed to the meeting room where the symposium sessions will take place. The panel discussion's topic will be "Evolving nexus of academia, industry, and government to advance and realize the benefits of robotics in crop production agriculture". This panel discussion will be focused on the multidisciplinary work and collaboration needed among institutions to advance and capitalize on the advantages of robotics and automation in agriculture. The poster session scheduled at the end of the day will run concurrently with one of the general poster sessions of ICPA. The posters included in this session will be selected from the abstracts of posters submitted to the ICPA conference covering aspects of robotics and automation applications to crop management. We expect that most of the posters will be presented by university graduate students and early career faculty, which will allow the symposium participants to learn the most recent advancements on those topics happening at university campuses around the world.