Nine PhD students across Europe will build new agricultural robots that can see, decide, and act on their own in farm fields. Current farming robots struggle to handle the messy, unpredictable reality of crops, soil, and weather. Most are tested only in controlled settings. AIGreenBots trains researchers to combine robotics, sensor fusion, and reliable machine learning so that robots can navigate real fields, identify weeds or ripe fruit, and make safe decisions under uncertainty. No existing European PhD programme covers this full mix of skills. If the project succeeds, it will produce a cohort of researchers who can design robots that reduce pesticide use, cut labour costs, and make precision farming practical at scale. The robots themselves—new platforms for perception, decision-making, and safe deployment—could eventually tend crops autonomously, monitor plant health, and apply treatments only where needed. That would shift agriculture from blanket spraying to targeted, data-driven care, quietly reshaping food production and reducing environmental harm.
View original technical description
AIGreenBots is a MSCA Doctoral Network that will implement inter-and-cross multidisciplinary training, career development and research collaborations for 9 researchers (i.e., ESR: PhD students), by an international and complementary partnership involving top Universities, research institutions, agriculture-related stakeholders, "living lab" and "robotic farm" infrastructures, and companies from different countries (PT, NL, UK, FR, ES), to provide tomorrow's talent with the skills and knowledge to tackle one of the major challenges of our society and the environment - agricultural robotics for precision/digital agriculture. By engaging the ESRs on a research-to-industrial exploitation paradigm, the AIGreenBots doctoral-level training brings together academic and non-academic participants from different areas: robotics, automation, remote sensing for precision agriculture, reliable artificial intelligence (AI) and probabilistic machine learning, systems engineering, probabilistic inference, sensor fusion, safety and real-deployment of agricultural robotics. Collectively, AIGreenBots will work with the Researchers to develop new agri-bots platforms (WP3), robotic perception and sensor fusion systems (WP4), reliable machine learning (WP5), decision-making under uncertainty (WP6), safety and important legislation aspects will be learned as well (WP7). Currently Europe-wide, there are no PhD training programs that focus on agriculture-robotics that expose students to such broad concepts and expertise, yet there is a rapidly growing need for that research. After completion of the project, Researchers will be fully capable of driving interdisciplinary research at the international level. Thus, AIGreenBots's structure will serve as a European platform for outstanding doctoral training in intelligent robotics for precision/automated agriculture and digital farming.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know