From June 29th to July 9th, the iFOODis Summer School took place on the island of Vulcano, Sicily. It brought together more than 55 participants, mostly from DLR and DFKI but also from the Netherlands, Italy, and Ireland with a great mix of nationalities to work on robotics, planetary analogues, astrobiology, earth sciences and the application of robotics in food/agriculture. One of the key focus areas was how current advances in robotics, especially from space sciences, can aid and support sustainable food production. During the summer school, a number of scientific experiments were carried out to test equipment and gather data. All summer school participants had the possibility and opportunity to work in different teams, explore fields that may not be their own, and get involved in the data acquisition, processing, visualization, and presentation. Lunchtime lectures, evening social events such as poster sessions, astronomy, and GIS classes complemented the field-based activities. The interaction,
collaboration and networking between the participants is an important outcome as it helps to foster inter- and transdisciplinary learning and understanding.
Vulcano is the third largest and southernmost island of the Aeolian archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the surface morphology of its central La Fossa caldera is similar to that of extremely dry and hostile planets such as Mars, Venus, and the Moon. It moreover hosts active fumarolic fields and a diverse geology. For these reasons, Vulcano is a remarkable training site to test instruments, rovers, or data processing techniques. Furthermore, robotic missions for terrain analysis, locomotion and drone mapping, and sampling campaigns were conducted in the extreme environments of La Fossa along with excursions to the neighboring islands Lipari and Stromboli.
In the frame of the DLR SainSOR project, spectral characterizations of diverse lithologies and volcanic materials with different field instruments: VNIR reflectance, Raman spectroscopy, LIBS, images of a hyperspectral camera system, and drones. We combined the spectral measurements with Integrated Positioning System (IPS, developed at DLR OS) data a multi-sensor system for localization, 3D reconstruction and inspection in unknown terrains a field documentation, and data pre-processing
tools in order to produce a combined dataset of measurements to be reproduced in the lab and further integrated in a combined instrument concept.
The Summer School was organized by Prof Vikram Unnithan from Constructor University Bremen (CU) and Dr. Frank Sohl (DLR). It was generously supported by the iFOODis consortium (Helmholtz Research Campaign) and forms part of the education and outreach workpages. Additional institutional help and support for the summer school was provided by Constructor University Bremen (CU), Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Europlanet Society Germany Hub.
