Greenbot, the autonomous farm vehicle that can find and get rid of weeds

On 10 October, the University of Seville’s Technical School of Agricultural Engineering (ETSIA) hosted a meeting of the members of the Greenbot Operational Group. This project brings together public and private researchers and institutions to address the need to protect woody crops, using cutting-edge technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing g, and precision agriculture. Its ultimate goal is to create an autonomous and modular robotic vehicle able to identify weeds through artificial vision and neutralize them by applying the exact volume of phytosanitary product, with great precision.

To carry out this work, the Greenbot project is made up of members of the University of Seville’s AGR 278 “Smart Biosystems Laboratory” research group, Cooperativas Agroalimentarias de Andalucía, GMV, TEPRO, PIONER HiBred Spain SL, Agropecuaria de Herrera SCA and the Asociación para el Desarrollo de La Campiña y Los Alcores Rural Development Group (GDR).

The Smart Biosystems Laboratory team’s research work is led by Dr. Manuel Pérez and Dr. Gregorio Egea, specialists in precision agriculture and remote sensing with extensive experience in the application of new technologies in agricultural practices.

The meeting was an opportunity to address issues such as the selection of the algorithms to be used by the weed detection model, the start of work on the robot’s artificial vision system, and the design of the actuation system, which Professor Pérez describes as “one of the most innovative elements of the Greenbot.”

The team members also used the meeting to discuss the challenges a robotic vehicle must solve to be successful in an agricultural environment, and analyzed the economic and environmental benefits that small and large-scale farmers might see by implementing it, thanks to the reduction of inputs and labor it would entail. Another advantage project members noted is the Greenbot’s potential to increase the attractiveness of the agricultural sector for new generations, promoting the necessary generational turnover and helping to stabilize the population of rural areas.

The Greenbot Task Force project is scheduled to last 21 months, ending on 30 June 2025, and is funded by the 2022 round of grants for European Innovation Partnership (EIP) Operational Groups, within the framework of Rural Development Program of Andalusia 2014-2022, which in turn is covered by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, and Sustainable Development’s Order of 7 July 2020 (sub-measure 16.1, operations 16.1.2 and 16.1.3).