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ROBOTICS AND HIGH TECH SOLUTIONS IN AGRICULTURA: AT THE START SMASH PROJECT, FUNDED BY TUSCANY REGION AND WITH THE CONTRIBUTE OF THE BIOROBOTICS INSTITUTE

Publication date: 22.06.2018
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The SMASH project, funded by the Tuscany Region (Tuscany POR FESR 2014-2020), aimed at the development of a collaborative robotic ecosystem that offers advanced technology solutions to address and solve issues related to food safety and environmental sustainability. The goal of the SMASH project (Smart Machine for Agricultural Hightech Solutions) is to create a collaborative and integrated robotic ecosystem for the sustainable management of agricultural crops. In smart farming, the ecosystem is built for monitoring the crop field with the help of sensors to monitor light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, and, for example, to automate the irrigation system. The 2-year project SMASH aims at collecting data for monitoring and managing grapevine and spinach yields.

SMASH gathers expertise from Tuscany academics and industry partners, expert in the agrifood field. The SMASH consortium combines 11 partners focused on the design and implementation of robotic devices equipped with sensors, actuators, gateways, integrated with a cloud-based platform including data analytics, remote management, web and mobile applications. The SMASH platform includes four different modules: crop-field monitoring (AgroBot), soil monitoring (Plantoide), flying sensors (FlyBot) and ancillary equipment in the field (AncillaryBot). The major benefits of the real-time data collection and processing include crop health imaging, integrated mapping, and surveying of agricultural land. From the data processing, growers can draw insights regarding plant health indices, plant counting and yield prediction, plant height measurement, quantity of fertilizers, drainage mapping, weed pressure mapping, etc.

The SMASH Consortium partners are: E.D.I. Progetti e Sviluppo srl (leader of the project), Yanmar R&D Europe srlAvmap srlBase srlSeintech srl, the Dipartimento di Gestione dei Sistemi Agrari, Alimentari e Forestali dell’Università degli studi di Firenze, the Istituto Italiano di TecnologiaCopernico srlDorian srl,  Giuntini Filippo and The BioRobotics Institute.

Click here to download the project schedule.