The Impact

Relevance for the Society

The iFOODis consortium is working on data collection networks to extend the impact and content of food production forecasting, ensuring more sustainable food production value chains using robotic methods and technologies that are, in principle, transferable. Furthermore, iFOODis is focusing on pushing boundaries in robotic core technologies to enhance remotely supervised robotic assets, to operate in a highly autonomous manner within a cooperative team over long periods and large areas, to safely, reliably and robustly acquire local data. These core technologies are highly transferable into several different application domains.

The sustainable value chain is reflected in iFOODis in several formats and forms, starting with the consortium’s implementation of the value chain throughout the food cycle. The overall more sustain-able food and environmental use of our coastal areas, which is a key habitat as well as highly relevant for food production for us humans, is at the forefront of sustainability. More diverse, small-scale and sustainable management seems to be a key here.
Furthermore, sustainable can also be understood as economic, which is why the use of “low-cost” automatic systems can be considered a possible key role for the future agricultural economy in the sense of a “sustainable value chain”. Only through the use of low-cost small machines can it be possible to offer a financially and economically viable alternative to the already highly automated agricultural land management, which is currently focused on large and heavy machinery.
In order to set the justified action of recording the actual situation in this worthy circle, however, be-fore the right action, the focus in the iFOODis project is placed on the “Situation Awareness” in order to capture a sustainable and provable picture and understanding of the actual situation over time and in many places in detail.
Looking at the whole food cycle, it is clear that among the challenges our world population will face in the coming years, automated and assistive robotic technologies will benefit the sustainability, efficiency and economy of food production, processing, transport, distribution, recovery, storage and disposal.
The iFOODis idea is to perceive and interpret the data of food production cycles in a modern way. The goal of the consortium for now is to generate a basis for decision-making that originates from acquired data, compared to using robotic technologies to act directly. Regarding this task, the main stakeholders are governmental organizations. Therefore, it is planned to include the following institutions in the project accompanying work group.

The Key Indicators

  • Provision of crucial and scientifically-sound data on the specific food production regions
  • Combining water and land-based measurements by means of advanced robotic technologies and Earthobservation data using AI methods
  • Knowledge transfer to end users

Economical and Technical Advancement

  • iFOODis will demonstrate the benefit of AI driven robotic assets for sustainable food cycles

  • Enhancement of robotic capabilities in

    application-related domains:

    • combining environmental perception

      with simultaneous localization,

    • multi-agent and multi-action planning,
    • intelligent data acquisition, interpretation and management
  • Reduced monitoring costs
  • Distributed measurements across a large variety of metric scales

Project Structure Overview

  • Backbone Project with overarching WPs

  • Technical work packages in sub-projects

    for one main and two transfer use cases:

    • Sub-project I (main) “Baltic Sea”: Future agriculture in Baltic Sea region
    • Sub-project II “Food delivery”:
      Future food delivery in crises regions
    • Sub-project III “Agriculture robotics”: Sustainable agriculture with intelligent robotic systems
  • “iFOODis-edu” Research School comprising graduate school, workshops and summer schools
The three different sub-projects will contribute to the impact of the iFOODis project in different ways.
Sub-project I will use the Schlei model region to demonstrate how the increase in detailed knowledge through robotic systems can contribute to the understanding of local processes and effects in agricultural culture.
Sub-project II will show how robotic transport with autonomous and teleoperated systems can help with the delivery of food in a humanitarian context.
Sub-project III will be directly related to the currently growing agricultural robotics industry, as the robots are directly used to maintain agricultural land.

Sub-Project / Use-Case I:

“Model region Schlei / Baltic Sea” – Future terrestrial & marine food resources
  • Continuous robotic assessment of ecosystem health on land and in surface waters in relation to agri- and maricultural activities
  • Synoptic observation of food crop state, agricultural activity and environmental parameters in the atmosphere, on land and in surface waters

Products / Transfer:

  • Synoptic geospatial environmental

    data base (real-time data access)

  • Provide robotic observational

    technologies

  • White paper for land-coastal waters

    management

  • Improved options for environmental data-based agricultural activities
  • Transferability of technology & knowledge to other regions worldwide

  • Quantification of exchange between the atmosphere, land and water bodies affected by agricultural activities considering major exchange pathways such as aeolian dust export, soil emission of greenhouse gases, groundwater discharge or water drainage

  • Assessing the state of the food crops, surveying important soil parameters, monitoring and evaluating consequences for adjacent coastal ecosystems
  • Deciphering susceptibilities of the investigated area with respect to severe weather conditions such as long-lasting heavy rain or droughts and climate change

Sub-Project / Use-Case II:

“Food delivery” - Future food delivery in crises regions

Where the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions has already occurred -> Humanitarian support is needed
  • Goal: Apply & research on iFOODis-related technologies in the field of last mile humanitarian food delivery
  • Sub-project connects iFOODis with already established projects & enriches the project consortia by relevant stakeholders in this domain (WFP, BRK)
  • With teleoperated vehicles, aid deliveries can be guaranteed without any risk to the driver
  • Innovation in environmental perception, localization, semantic scene analysis, human-machine interface & teleoperation is also relevant in the fields of autonomous driving & digitization of traffic, and offers a high potential with regard to challenging situations in unstructured environments 

 

This Activity is cross-funded by DLR and the Bavarian Ministry for Economic Affairs. projekt-ahead.de

Sub-Project / Use-Case III:

“Agriculture robotics” - Sustainable agriculture with intelligent robotic systems
  • Many of the technologies developed in iFOODis are not only suitable for monitoring, but also form the basis for active farming with robots
  • The aim of this subproject is therefore to identify possible transfer potential of individual technologies or components
  • Promising technology will be selected and demonstrated in a relevant scenario