Biodiverse Cultivation Systems involve complex planning and maintenance, both at the employee and the company level, when a multitude of crops are mixed in the field. Sowing, planting and harvesting crops at different moments and scattered across the field, is cumbersome.
We want to stimulate the development of robots that can support the farmer and help to adequately manage this higher agroecological complexity. Currently, there are no robots on the market that can autonomously carry out such a broad range of tasks at individual plant level.
Another difficulty is to identify what actions are required where and when. This is why monitoring and automatic gathering of structured data about the status and variations in the system is so important. The same is true for identifying progress and milestones with respect to positive ecological impact and the functioning of the biodiverse cultivation system in general.
A small group of farmers is already interested in using robots for Biodiverse Cultivation Systems, but cannot afford to buy them. As a result, there is no business case for the development and production of such robots. However, there is a way out: the further development of those robots can be done in an engineering competition. Read further: Agrobot Engineering Competition.