Robotics in the vineyard
Vineyards are most interesting for investigating precision agriculture and robotics for the following reasons:
- High-value crop (for fine wines)
- Labor-intensive crop (all year round there are tasks in the vineyard)
- Grapes are a perennial crop, so systems can be refined over a longitudinal study
- Potential mixture of permaculture in between rows (because of deep rootstocks, and isolated irrigation drips)
- Vineyards (like Costaflores Organic Vineyard) often use a 4-wire trellis, which could be useful for different robotic integrations, data transfer, charging, distributed solar energy collection, etc.
Developing "Robotics for Microfarms" is the mandate of the ROMI-project.eu, lead by Jonathan Minchin.
The Openvino project is collaborating with the ROMI project to help is this endeavor.
Costaflores / Openvino is ideally suited as a development platform because:
- This is a functioning, production, commercial vineyard.
- Proper size: the grape production on the finca is <3Ha
- Mendoza is a region where most tasks in the vineyard are still manual
- Existing IoT sensor integrations
- Existing and developing work log (How do you know which tasks to automate in the vineyard?)
- Ideal physical layout: trellis, sensors, observation platform
- LoRa and Wifi connectivity
- Drone port
- Blockchain and sidechain data registration
- Costaflores is organic certified viticulture
- Solar energy powered and conventional power available
- Opposite seasons from Europe, allowing for two-season testing
- Many available local technical resources
- Excellent collaborative branding
To further this development, we are preparing an experimental vineyard at the FabLab Valldaura campus.