
The FORC (Force-A) partner is a start-up company, located in Orsay, France, that designs and commercializes innovative plant diagnostic tools and solutions for real-time crop monitoring and management, deploying portable and on-the-go optical sensors. Force-A’s MultiplexTM and DualexTM optical sensors assess the physiological, health and maturity status of grapevine through its intrinsic fluorescence properties. Vehicle-mounted Multiplex delivers on-the-go high throughput data and high resolution maps for grapevine plots. Spatial variability of several plant status indicators such as vigour, nitrogen deficiencies, disease susceptibility, presence of diseases and grape maturity at the canopy level and anthocyanin content at the cluster level are assessed.
Some national grapevine-related programs (VINNEO, DEFISTIM) and other EC projects (CROPS, INNOVINE) are being currently addressed. Previous experiences with designing sensors integrated on robots for mapping on-the-go agronomical parameters in vineyards, establishing calibration curves for anthocyanin data on grape clusters, and setting up calibration curves for chlorophyll data on leaves are added to the project.
Partner FORC carries out the following main tasks:
- Establish the operational requirements and appropriate protocols for real-time monitoring vineyard quality (at the canopy and bunches levels) (WP1).
- Participate to the design of the on-the-go multisensory robot (WP2).
- Leads the data fusion and modelling WP (leader of WP3).
- Support the partners in the data management process (WP4).
- Participate in the platform validation (WP4).
- Participate in the in-field demonstrations (WP2 & WP4).
- Contribute to the dissemination of the results and management (WP5 and WP6).