This is the first time that Maria do Céu Antunes has visited Técnico as Minister of Agriculture. The Robotics4Farmers project was presented to the Minister’s entourage on January 9, in the basement of the Mechanics III Building. The project proposes a new method without wasting water or fuel and without applying chemicals for weeding (controlling weeds in a crop field). Instead, an electric mobile platform is used – which can be driven or moved around the plantation autonomously – equipped with a laser that concentrates solar and artificial radiation, slowing down the life cycle of weeds.
“We need more projects like this”, said the minister. “They should be scaled up and be given more visibility. We want to count on Técnico to help on this task”, she added, saying that she was “particularly pleased” with the project presentation. Pedro Amaral, Vice-president of Técnico for Corporate Interface, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, thanked the minister for her visit and invited her to continue monitoring the development of other Técnico projects.
The project was developed by researchers and students from the Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IDMEC), a research unit affiliated with Técnico, and funded to the tune of 800,000 euros by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR). The platform is equipped with front cameras that detect obstacles in the vicinity in the case of autonomous driving. Equipped with four-wheel drive, the vehicle has a suspension that adapts to the unevenness and irregularities of the terrain. The platform’s autonomy at this stage is around four hours.
After the minister’s visit, Jorge Martins, a Técnico professor and IDMEC researcher, highlighted the variety of technologies involved in the process. “The technology involved in the agricultural sector requires as much complexity as other areas,” he argues. According to the Técnico professor, “young engineers underestimate the agricultural sector because they don’t realise its importance”. For example, he said that the Robotics4Farmers team includes researchers from areas as varied as electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, autonomy, mobility, data collection and image processing, among other branches of engineering.
Besides avoiding the poisoning of the land and the cost of raw materials, Robotics4Farmers takes into account another environmental concern – the destruction of weeds reduces the area of land covered by vegetation, which can lead to desertification. Instead of destroying these plants, this method of thermal weeding only delays their life cycle, allowing the crop to develop without competition at the earliest stages of planting. Once the ‘dormancy’ period caused by the laser is over, the weeds will resume their usual growth, without jeopardising the growth of the crop that has developed and avoiding desertification.
“The aim of the project”, says Pedro Rosa, also a Técnico professor and IDMEC researcher, “is to remove almost all the [typical weeding] elements to solve the problem in a simple way”. Focused on a hybrid solution of a ‘sunlight concentrator’ (combined with artificially generated radiation for the greyest days), Robotics4Farmers’ technology aims to contribute to more technologically advanced agriculture, promoting the sector’s financial and environmental sustainability.
