
The UPV (Universitat Politècnica de València) partner is represented by the Agricultural Robotics Laboratory, which belongs to the Agricultural Mechanization R&D&i group. The lab was founded by Prof. Rovira in 2006. It is mainly devoted to precision farming for orchards, intelligent offroad vehicles and machine vision. Since the start, the Lab has worked on stereoscopic vision and 3D mapping of orchards, the vulnerability of GPS to determine vehicle states, and the application of global grids to quantize the spatial variability of orchards. In 2011, the Edmund Optics Research & Innovation Award was awarded to the lab as well as the Valencia Idea Award.
One of its current members received in 2012 the CIGR Armand Blanc Prize for a conference paper and in 2013 the Farming by Satellite Prize organized by the European Commission.
The main tasks of the UPV partner are included below:
- Intense participation in WP2, contributing to the design and implementation of the navigation and perception engines of the multi-sensor robot.
- Participates in the implementation of machine vision and image processing systems, assisting as well in perceptual data fusion (WP3).
- Leads WP4, especially the management of data through compatible crop maps and the transfer and display of maps.
- Participate in the platform validation (WP4) and leads the scheduled demonstrations (WP2 & WP4).
- Contribute to the dissemination of the results and management (WP5 and WP6).
- Coordinates scientific activities as Technical Manager.