Sensors, autonomous robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being applied to agricultural management in the Alentejo steppe through the SiARA project – Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics in the Alentejo Steppe. The project, led by the Mechanical Engineering Institute (IdMEC), a research unit affiliated with Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, aims to support the sustainable management of agroecological systems in UNESCO’s Castro Verde Biosphere Reserve, reconciling agricultural productivity with biodiversity conservation.
“The project proposes an innovative approach to autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, based on the integration of Visual SLAM – a technology that enables robots to orient themselves and map their surroundings in real time – with semantic navigation supported by artificial intelligence”, explains Jorge Martins, a professor and researcher at Técnico, who is involved in the project. Using images captured by cameras and satellite positioning systems, the system is able to create three-dimensional maps of the land and recognise elements such as obstacles, vegetation or other moving objects.
In practice, this technology allows for monitoring land conditions and aids in agricultural decision-making by using data collected directly from the field. According to the researcher, this integration helps to “improve the decision-making capacity of autonomous systems”, allowing the robots’ behaviour to be adapted to different land conditions. “The use of techniques such as Explainable AI – an approach that allows us to understand and interpret the decisions of artificial intelligence systems – and reinforcement learning, together with multispectral and environmental sensors, contributes to more adaptive decisions and more transparency in the human-robot interaction”, he adds.
Contributing to “the sustainability of crop and livestock production” and to strengthening the resilience of production systems in the face of environmental and climate challenges, the project is based on technology previously validated under the Robotics4Farmers initiative at Técnico. Fieldwork began in March 2026, including tests of the EVAbot robot in waterlogged soil conditions, on land belonging to the Campo Branco Farmers’ Association.
SiARA is being developed in partnership with the Beja Polytechnic Institute and the Campo Branco Farmers’ Association, ensuring the link between research and practical application in the region. The initiative was approved under the 7th edition of the Promove Programme, run by the “la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with Banco BPI and in partnership with the Foundation for Science and Technology.
