The long-term goal is to develop robotic tools and AI systems to monitor, model and manage food-producing ecosystems. The ecosystems that we are targeting are small, highly diversified, organic farms. The tools that we are designing will have to intervene in this complex natural environment and will have to gather the necessary data that allows to track and predict the health of the plants and the ecosystem. These new tools may help increase food production AND the biodiversity of farming systems while at the same time lowering the physical effort needed to run a farm.

We made the first steps towards this goal in the EU funded project Robotics for Microfams (ROMI). Our starting point was the observation that all over Europe, young farmers are starting small market farms and direct sales businesses. These farms can be found both in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. They grow a large variety of crops (up to 100 different varieties of vegetables per year) on small surfaces (0.01 to 5 ha) using agroecological farming practices. These farms have proven to be highly productive, sustainable and economically viable. However, a lot of work is done manually, resulting in physically challenging work conditions.