EU-Funded ROMI Project Brings Open Robotics, Artificial Intelligence to Micro-Farming

Building robots that can fly, run along aerial cables, or work at ground-level, ROMI aims to transform small-scale farming.

A "cablebot" can monitor crops grown in polytunnels. (📷: ROMI)

The European Union, as part of its H2020 research initiative, is funding a look into how robotics can transform small market gardens across rural and urban areas — and in its third year the ROMI project has begun delivering results.

"ROMI is a four-year Europe-funded H2020 research project committed to promote a sustainable, local, and human-scale agriculture," Jonathan Minchin writes in a piece for Open Access Government on the project. "It is developing an affordable, multi-purpose platform constituted of robotic tools, data, software and shared documentation to help farming communities increase their production and improve their working conditions. ROMI is developing a range of interoperable robotic tools: a land-based robot, aerial robotic tools including a hung cablebot for polytunnels, a drone for crop monitoring, and a 3D scanner for phenotyping in indoor and outdoor environments.

"ROMI's applied research is directly driven by the expertise of professional farming communities, and are field-tested across four seasons at two core sites: Chatelain Maraîchage near Paris and at Valldaura Self-sufficiency Labs near Barcelona. All outcomes of ROMI will be made accessible under an open hardware/software licences, encouraging a community of users to propose, customize and develop additional functions that follow farm specific requirements."

The project's output includes a land robot developed by the Sony Computer Science Laboratory which is designed to work at crop level and in partnership with an overhead cable-based robot and a flying drone to acquire a detailed picture of crop development in a small-scale farm. Data from these is processed by an artificial intelligence developed by the Humboldt University's Adaptive Systems Group, while plant modelling comes courtesy of the MOSAIC group at Inria.

"The project is testing a new strategy to monitor, interpret and predict crop development by combining high-throughput data coming from the robot’s cameras and computational models of plant growth," Minchin explains. "The project is working on advanced 3D plant analysis and modelling techniques for indoor and in-field data acquisition. The ROMI team also needs to go beyond the state of the art in outdoor phenotyping, in order to extract biologically relevant information for farmers."

Minchin's full article is available on Open Access Government now; more information on the ROMI project itself can be found on the official website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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