Replacing chemicals with Robotics for more sustainable Agriculture
Automating Regenerative Agriculture (AURA) project at Maynooth University, co-funded by Enterprise Ireland and Comex-McKinnon and in collaboration with Otherlab, aims to optimize farming at an industrial scale by increasing plant monitoring and intervention through the growth cycle. By reacting in real-time to the field development, the use of pesticide can be reduced significantly.
Additionally, with the integration of solar energy, such a setup can be fully self sufficient. In the AURA project, other research topics are explored, such as pixel farming, soil monitoring and intervention, plant imaging, and so on.
The research field measururing 1-hectare includes multiple greenhouses alongside the main field. The robots used on-site are FarmBots, a gantry based robot with a custom build firmware, and the Callan platform, an industrial scale robot developed and built at Maynooth University.
If you are interested in reading more about the project, feel free to check our website
