Politecnico di Milano took part in the second edition of ACRE (Agri-food Competition for Robot Evaluation), a competition dedicated to agricultural robots, which took place in Cornaredo (MI) at the ‘Cascina Baciocca’ experimental farm of the University of Milan.
This edition of ACRE was dedicated to robots designed for the weeding of open-field crops, an area in which exploiting this type of machine, even in a low-cost version, could bring great environmental, social and economic benefits by providing an alternative to the use of chemicals.
The competition involved robots built both by start-ups connected in various ways to academia and developing advanced robotic solutions and by companies already offering engineered products on the market. The performances were evaluated according to strict scientific criteria predefined by the organisers with the aim to measure the performance of all participants in an objective and repeatable manner.
ACRE’s main goal is to bring the world of agricultural machinery industry closer to the world of expert researchers in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, in order to also create solid partnerships that in the near future will allow bridging the existing agricultural robotics gap between the European industry and that of the United States – and similarly between the Italian industry and that of various European realities such as the Netherlands and France.
ACRE is funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 ‘METRICS’ project, with the primary aim of increasing the spread of robots and artificial intelligence techniques in agriculture. The competition is organised on the Italian side by AIRlab, the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics laboratory of Politecnico di Milano, and by the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of the University of Milan, with the collaboration of FederUnacoma and Informatore Agrario.
