Nano-Agro: a novel, multi-purpose RAI system for sports turf

Agriculture and industries are severely impacted and/or permanently disrupted by unforeseen events, such as the crisis caused by Covid-19 outbreak, and by Government policies like Brexit that will have a longer lasting impact on migrant labour availability. As an example, it is estimated that the combination of Brexit & COVID19 will increase the cost of production of Strawberries alone by £15 million in the UK in 2020\.

Simultaneously, industrial robotics or Industry 4.0 is on the rise and new telecommunication networks like LoraWan Sigfox and currently 5G are being deployed in the UK in this crucial context. The large adoption of IoT, automation and big data into agriculture and industry processes could help these sectors to recover, grow and create new opportunities by increasing productivity, tackling labour shortages and enabling control of the production lines at any time and from anywhere.

E-Nano has developed an interface called O.S.C.A.R. (Optimized Smart 5G-Controlled AI Robot), a novel Wifi/4G/5G-enabled robot platform that enables robots to work in collaboration in a swarm fashion and allows analysis of the collected data from a broad spectrum of sensors embedded in the robot and in the field.

E-Nano is now proposing to develop a Robotics and Artificial Intelligence system by integrating O.S.C.A.R. into a modular and multi-purpose robotic solution called Nano-Agro which will be developed within this project. The proposed system aims to operate autonomously in the field to automate predefined tasks - decreasing users' workload - while assessing the soil - supporting precision agriculture and better yield.

Various specific add-ons, sensors and data analytics tools will be developed and implemented by E-Nano during this project.