VINBOT is an all-terrain autonomous mobile robot with a set of sensors capable of capturing and analysing vineyard images and 3D data by means of cloud computing applications, to determine the yield of vineyards and to share information with the winegrowers. VINBOT responds to a need to boost the quality of European wines by implementing precision viticulture (PV) to estimate the yield (amount of fruit per square metre of vine area: kg/m2). It is also meant to offer a set of information and maps understandable and useful for the winegrowers.
With this idea in mind, namely, helping winegrowers to take decisions, is important to develop a system able to offer well processed data and don’t make them worry about the technology behind. After all, they have a lot of aspects to deal with when making quality wine and it is know that technology can sometimes be a headache for them.
Mission control and planning for the robotic platform is fundamental to reach this usefulness but even more important is the data management. VINBOT can “translate” the incoming data from sensors like lasers or cameras into 3D maps, upload this maps to a server and then perform precision viticulture analysis to offer the grower real estimations, rates and predictions in a friendly web-based interface.
In the future all this maps and semi-processed data could be shared between growers and analyzed with big data techniques offering precision viticulture new sources of knowledge. Allowing the academy to find new indexes comparing fields, years, varieties…
Robotnik is developing the localization and autonomous navigation for VINBOT and working closely with Ateknea Solutions to integrate both hardware and software in the robot, based on the Summit-XL HL.