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AgriFoRwArdS Newsletter Issue 11 - January 2023 Edition

Welcome to the 11th issue of the AgriFoRwArdS CDT Newsletter. Scroll down to find out what has been happening within AgriFoRwArdS, and the wider Agri-Food Robotics community, recently.

Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to keep up to date with all the latest news and activities!

Happy New Year from the AgriFoRwArdS Team

AgriFoRwArdS would like to wish all members of our community a very happy New Year.

2022 brought us many exciting successes, which you can read more about in our recent article '2022 – celebrating a year of AgriFoRwArdS'.

We are sure that 2023 will be just as, if not even more, productive and exciting!

AgriFoRwArdS Student News

IROS’22 Conference: Agriforwards CDT goes global, a report by Elijah Almanzor

AgriFoRwArdS CDT Student Elijah Almanzor, along with members of the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge, recently attended the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, held in Kyoto, Japan in October 2022.

Elijah tells us about his experience of attending, and presenting at this internationally renowned conference...

There were around 3,000 attendees, including academics and students, engineers in industry, and entrepreneurs, which resulted in interesting conversations, sharing of ideas and most importantly, networking. During the conference, I presented my work on a soft robotic gripper which uses a combination of electrical impedance tomography and machine learning to automatically determine the ripeness of fruits during grasping. The questions I was asked after my presentation, opened up avenues and important factors I need to consider in future work relating to this project.
Elijah gives his talk titled 'Automated Fruit Quality Testing Using an Electrical Impedance Tomography-Enabled Soft Robotic Gripper' to the IROS2022 audience.
Overall, it was a completely different experience from another much smaller conference I previously attended (Robotsoft 2022), which had a more limited scope on soft robotics. The conference encompassed a breadth of robotics topics ranging from computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence, soft robotics, manipulation, sensing and control, among many others. Attending the plenary talks, and academic project presentations related to these topics introduced me to many new algorithms and theories I have not previously encountered due to being seemingly outside of my field of soft and agri-robotics.
I would personally say that my biggest takeaway from attending this conference was to watch, read and learn more about other areas of robotic research which are especially outside of my research interests as the seemingly unrelated talks have given me plenty of ideas and new solutions for future projects.
Elijah got chance to do some sightseeing with some of his research colleagues while visiting Kyoto

Students visit AgriFoRwArdS Industry Partner Zero Carbon Farms

In November last year our students took a trip to London to visit CDT Industry Partner Zero Carbon Farms.

Zero Carbon Farms (ZCF) supply their crops to UK top restaurants and supermarkets. Their unique growing environment uses up to 90% less water, and much smaller spaces, than a conventional farm. Owing to proprietary data, every m2 of a ZCF farm is significantly more productive than traditional farmland. This means ZCF can grow more crops in less space and can operate within dense urban areas, which brings down transportation costs, and in turn reduces carbon footprint. As it says in the name, reducing carbon footprint has been a priority for the Zero Carbon Farms team since the beginning.

During the visit the students met with the ZCF team and were guided through the underground farm in London, by Tommy Vermier, the Grow Manager. The location used to be an air-raid shelter, but is now filled with shelves, illuminated with purple LEDs, that house a variety of greens. Tommy took the students through the entire growing process, from seed germination to crop harvest. He also gave our students a tour of the irrigation and grow systems that are used in the farm. This was a fascinating and informative visit, for which the AgriFoRwArdS CDT is very grateful to Zero Carbon Farms.

You can read more about the visit on the AgriFoRwArdS Student Blog.

Harry Rogers visits his School to talk to students about their career options

In October 2022, AgriFoRwArdS CDT Student Harry Rogers, who is currently in his 2nd year of PhD study at the University of East Anglia, went back to visit his old secondary school, Ormiston Victory Academy, to talk to the students about his career so far, and hopefully inspire them to take an interest in robotics and agriculture.

Personally, I was not expecting a large turnout as previous sessions have been explained to me as informal and held in small conference rooms with around 5-10 students attending. However, I had a much larger turnout of over 50 students across both sessions.
Harry with students from Ormiston Victory Academy

Harry spoke to the students about his journey so far since leaving the school, covering how he came to be studying a PhD within robotics, as well as previous projects he had worked on. Students and staff alike asked lots of questions, including the grades Harry achieved at school, how to get into robotics, and how to build confidence.

I enjoyed talking about previous projects I have worked on and how I built up confidence throughout them. I also enjoyed talking to students about what they should consider for future studies within their careers.

AgriFoRwArdS Events

Events upcoming in 2023

What Napoleon Bonaparte can teach you about giving a scientific presentation (12th January) - In this seminar Professor Gary Sutton from the University of Lincoln will discuss how to present complicated scientific data to a general audience.

Quarterly PhD Progress meeting (17th and 20th January) - CDT Students from Cohort 3 will present their PhD work so far to other CDT Students and Staff. We will hear about their first few months of study, and what they have planned for the future of their projects.

Implementing Robotics into your Business (30th January) - Training at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry

AgriFoRwArdS Spring School (week commencing 27th February) - see below for details

Visit to the National Centre for Food Manufacturing (25th April) - CDT Training and development opportunity focused on the UK's largest manufacturing industry: "food & drink".

Introduction to Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities (30th and 31st May) - Cohort 4 attend Riseholme Campus for a training session covering an introduction to the role of current technologies in agriculture to help ground their research in real challenges and opportunities.

AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference (13th to 15th September) - see below for details

Joint Robotics CDT Annual Conference 2023 (13th to 15th September) - see below for details

The AgriFoRwArdS CDT Entrepreneurship Lecture Series 2022/23

The AgriFoRwArdS Entrepreneurship Lecture Series was launched last term in response to requests from our CDT students. Organised by Amy Weatherup, a serial entrepreneur who also runs the i-Teams course at the University of Cambridge (www.iteamsonline.org), the lectures and workshops were selected based on student feedback from a long list of possible topics.

The lecturers are all industry practitioners with real-world experience of working in start-ups or as consultants, and the Lecture Series includes a mixture of lectures and interactive sessions.

Topics covered last term included a beginner’s guide to starting a company, delivered by Brian Corbett, co-founder of multiple university spin-outs including Entropic which was acquired by Microsoft and KuduSmart which produces a fitness monitor, and Alex Smeets, an experienced consultant to multiple local startups. We also had a very popular talk from Ben Scott-Robinson, co-founder and CEO of the Small Robot Company, which is delivering per-plant monitoring and treatment for arable crops.

This coming term will include two workshops covering writing effective pitches and having effective conversations with industrial partners, as well as lectures on intellectual property and more guest entrepreneurs from the world of agritech. All lectures and workshops are delivered online monthly on Monday or Tuesday mornings, and will resume from the first week in February.

The AgriFoRwArdS Spring School

This year we are taking a little bit of a different approach to the Annual Summer School. Being held in late February/early March 2023, the SPRING School will be hosted by the University of Lincoln.

The AgriFoRwArdS Students will be travelling to Lincoln week commencing 27th February, to take part in the week of activities, which will take place mainly at the Riseholme Campus. Alongside the days filled with exciting challenges, there will also be opportunity for networking, at the Spring School Dinner. The activities themselves are inspired by this years ICRA Conference Competition, which has been created by the University of Lincoln and University of Cambridge

Each year the ICRA Organising Committee invites proposals for competitions to the held during the conference. These competitions provide a unique venue for state-of-the-art technical demonstrations from research labs throughout academia and industry. This year, Dr Marcello Calisiti from the University of Lincoln, worked with Prof Marc Hanheide and Prof Elizabeth Sklar (also both from the University of Lincoln) and Prof Fumiya Iida and Dr Fulvio Forni (from the University of Cambridge) to put together a proposal for a robotic chef competition.

The CDT's Spring School will be a platform to develop knowledge needed for the competition. With students working together to develop the 'robot kitchen', students will then be welcome to team up and entre the ICRA Competition itself.

We are looking forward to an exciting week of knowledge building and innovation.

The 4th AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference

This year's AgriFoRwArdS Annual Conference is being hosted by the University of Cambridge, and it's going to be a big one! Combined with the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) Conference (which is also being hosted by the University of Cambridge this year) and the Joint Robotics CDT Annual Conference (hosted by AgriFoRwArdS), we expect over 200 delegates. The Conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on the 13th/14th September 2023.

Arrangements are currently being made, so watch this space for more information!

Meet the AgriFoRwArdS Team

Professor Ruchi Choudhary

Professor Ruchi Choudhary specialises in building simulation and environmental characteristics of the built environment. At Cambridge, she is leading the multi-disciplinary Energy Efficient Cities initiative (EECi) with colleagues in transport technologies and urban planning. Her current research concerns urban-scale energy simulation of built environments, with specific emphasis on uncertainty analysis and retrofits of existing buildings. The work investigates how simulation science can support pathways towards energy efficient cities, taking into account large variability among buildings, and a highly dynamic context associated with economics, regulations, and the influence of new emerging technologies.

The Energy Efficient Cities initiative research led by Professor Choudhary has established new methods and tools for the simulation community such as a simulation platform for multi-period energy retrofits under economic uncertainties, stochastic urban-scale energy model that quantifies the impact of current UK policies and a spatial energy network optimization tool. These tools predict energy and emissions due to buildings at requisite time and spatial resolution.

Ruchi currently works with Cohort 3 student Vijja Wichitwechkarn on a project that is sponsored by Zero Carbon Farms based in London and using EECi advised for growing their crops.

Dr Grzegorz Cielniak

Dr Grzegorz Cielniak is an Associate Professor in Robotics at the University of Lincoln within the Lincoln Agri-Robotics Centre (LAR). He is also a member of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), and co-founded the University’s cross-disciplinary research group in Agri-Food Technology. Greg is the Deputy Academic Lead for the AgriFoRwArdS CDT at the University of Lincoln, and as well as being Primary Supervisor for Cohort 1 student Karoline Heiwolt, he provides academic and pastoral support to all of the CDTs Lincoln PhD students.

Greg obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Örebro University, Sweden in 2007 and his MSc in Robotics from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland in 2000. His research is multidisciplinary and crosses areas of computer science, engineering and agriculture. His research interests include mobile robotics, artificial intelligence and multi-modal perception systems. His subject specialism falls within agri-robotics and includes robotic perception and navigation in unstructured outdoor environments, with a strong focus on robotic application delivery in agriculture.

As well as working with AgriFoRwArdS, teaching on the MSc Robotics and Autonomous Systems programme, and supervising various PhD projects, Greg holds a number of funded grants for collaborative projects between academia and the agri-food industry, including being a coordinator of the RASberry funding programme bringing together various funding sources to support robotic solutions for soft fruit production.

Industry Partner News

Dogtooth work with AgriFoRwArdS on PhD project

Established in 2015 with the goal of developing soft fruit picking robots, Dogtooth is one of the UK’s oldest harvest-robotics start-ups. Based in Cambridgeshire, the company now has a fleet of 70 strawberry picking robots (some of which you will see in the picture of the Dogtooth Robot Team behind) and continues to expand . During 2022, the company’s robots have harvested around five hectares on multiple customer sites in Europe and Australia.

Dogtooth Gen3 robot in commercial use in a glasshouse at Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent UK

Dogtooth will support the AgriFoRwArdS CDT by sponsoring one or more PhD studentships, the first of which has already started at the University of Lincoln. Dogtooth will be working with Cohort 3 Student Emlyn Williams, who will be supervised by Dr Athanasios Polydoros, on his PhD project titled 'Robot Learning of Harvesting Tasks from Humans’ Demonstrations'.

Of the collaboration, Dogtooth’s CEO, Dr Duncan Robertson, says:

We were delighted to support the AgriFoRwArdS CDT. Agriculture is commercially very challenging and we need a new generation of passionate scientists and engineers to unlock the productivity increases required for the industry to thrive. This high quality academic program will help enormously to kick start the process in the UK.

The goal of the company’s first sponsored PhD project will be to develop approaches for increasing robot efficacy using training by example. Of the project, Dogtooth’s Director of Research, Dr Tom Dean, said:

We are very excited to be collaborating with the University of Lincoln to sponsor a PhD student. Not only was the project squarely relevant to the way in which Dogtooth develops robotic picking algorithms, but also we felt that it would be good to build stronger connections with the academic groups. Commercially focussed businesses like Dogtooth rarely have time for academic research internally – but it is important that we stay on top of the latest trends in order to stay ahead of the curve.

Dogtooth’s robotic fruit picking technology is already state-of-the-art. The company uses colour stereo cameras coupled with deep learning based artificial neural networks, for both semantic scene understanding and the selection of effective picking strategies. Instead of handling the body of the fruit, which can cause cross contamination and bruising, the robots pick by grasping and cutting the stalk, which requires a high degree of hand-eye-coordination accuracy. Having picked a berry, the robot uses an on-board inspection system for defect detection and grading in situ on board the robot, obviating the need for repeated handling and reducing the overhead cost of quality control. The company has general patents in multiple territories on ideas such as stalk-based picking and on-robot inspection and packaging.

Dogtooth robot picking a strawberry

To date, the company has used a picking-as-a-service model, whereby Dogtooth employees operate robots on customer sites. Typically, there is one operator for every eight robots. However, this model is hard to scale and next generation robot has been designed to be operated by customer personnel. The company is also developing robots for several other applications on the farm including top fruit picking (apples, pears, etc.).

Agri-Food and Robotics Research Continues

Cohort 3 start their PhD projects

In October 2022, our third cohort of amazing CDT students started their PhD study at their respective universities. Find out about the projects, their supervisors, and their industry partners below.

James Bennett

James is studying his PhD (Seeing Spectral Signatures) at the University of East Anglia, and in collaboration with Antobot. His project, which is being supervised by Prof Graham Finlayson, aims to develop algorithms for mapping the RGB signal recorded by a conventional camera to corresponding spectral signatures that are useful for solving classification problems including ripe vs non-ripe and the diagnosis of plant diseases.

Samuel Carter

Samuel is carrying out his PhD study at the University of Lincoln, under the primary supervision of Dr Amir Ghalamzan Esfahani. The project, being carried out in collaboration with 2 Sisters Food Group is titled 'Learning robot navigation and manipulation from demonstrations' and will looking into state-of-the-art deep learning methods. The aim of the project is to develop robots that will not only mimic or imitate the demonstrated task, but be able to generate ways of emulating demonstrations, and include those demonstrations, when learning the task.

Garry Clawson

Garry's PhD project, titled 'Designing Food Supply Chain for Nutritional Delivery and Traceability' is being supported by Dyson Farming. Garry, who is studying his PhD at the University of Cambridge, aims to explore the application of robotics, sensors, distributed systems, and supply chain digitisation to identify linkages between supply chain design (product, process and location) and nutrition losses (micro). Using nutrition as a data point the optimisation of supply chains to take into account product functionality as part of its digital journey opens up new ways of visualising the agri-food supply chain. He is studying under the primary supervisor of Dr Mukesh Kumar.

Alex Elias

Alex's PhD project, titled 'Co-creation and trust to address regulatory, ethical and interactional challenges in Digital Farming' aims to identify the main obstacles to the utilisation of agricultural robots. Within the project, Alex will investigate ways to enhance the design of these systems and the way they are implemented while considering issues of regulation, law, ethics, accessibility, and user engagement. Alex is studying at the University of Lincoln under the primary supervision of Marisé Galvez Trigo.

Kyle Fogarty

Kyle is studying his PhD at the University of Cambridge. The project, titled '3D Modelling of Natural Structures' aims to explore several technical challenges in relation to geometry processing, scene representation, and visual perception, for producing high-fidelity 3D models of visual reality with an emphasis on modelling natural structures. Using point clouds as a method of geometry acquisition and leveraging recent advances in machine learning, we will take a data-driven approach to developing new algorithms and computational techniques to solve these technical challenges. Kyle is working with primary supervisor from Dr Cengiz Öztireli.

Xumin Gao

Xumin is studying his PhD 'Automatic aphid counting based on deep learning and robotics technology in unstructured agriculture environments', at the University of Lincoln, under the supervision of Dr Junfeng Gao. The project is being carried out in collaboration with the British Beet Research Organisation (BBRO), and aims to develop a CNN that automatically counts aphids and can adapt to deny distribution of aphids, small size of aphids and so on. Then to use robotic technology to help realise automatic aphid counting.

Callum Lennox

Callum, who is studying at the University of Lincoln, is working with the Douglas Bomford Trust on his PhD project titled 'Real-time vision-based spot spraying development for high efficiency and precision weed management'. He is being supervised by Dr Junfeng Gao. The main aims of the project are to build image libraries containing weeds and crops using various methods of both data augmentation and data collection; to develop a deep learning model to detect the presence of weeds/crops in an image; and then to integrate this deep learning model onto a physical system that uses a spray boom to spray weeds.

Bethan Moncur

Bethan's project, titled 'Deciding to implement emerging technologies: the help of digital technologies in planning for the implementation of robotics and autonomous systems in food manufacturing firms', aims to incorporate AR and VR into technology management decision support tools and study the effects. The focus will be on facilitating decision-making in the context of implementing emerging technologies, such as robotics and autonomous systems, that are necessary for the transition to a more sustainable food system. The insights gained will be used to develop a decision-making tool to test in the agri-food industry. Bethan is studying at the University of Cambridge, under the primary supervision of Dr Letizia Mortara, and in collaboration with Samworth Brothers.

Nikolaos Tsagkopoulos

Nikos is working with Prof Marc Hanheide and Saga Robotics on his PhD project titled 'Long-Term Affordable Navigation in Unseen Agricultural Environments'. Studying at the University of Lincoln, Nikos's project will focus on learning visual general representations of agricultural traversable paths, robust in seasonal and vegetation changes. Current agricultural navigation systems rely on expensive sensors such as GNSS/RTK and Lidars. Visual-based navigation aims to replace these sensors with cheap monocular cameras. This technology will enable affordable and accurate navigation in GNSS/RTK denied environments.

Rachel Trimble

Rachel is studying her PhD (Using reinforcement learning to optimise adaptive control of invading plant disease epidemics) at the University of Cambridge. She is working under the supervision of Dr Nik Cunniffe and is collaborating with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). The project aims to explore and evaluate the use of reinforcement learning approaches to optimise control of invasive plant diseases. This will mean building plant disease models and reinforcement learning agents and evaluating the performance of the agents. The work will investigate the simulated cost of control, epidemic outcomes and robustness to uncertainty in the epidemic model.

Vijja Wichitwechkarn

Vijja's project, titled 'Crop-agnostic optimisation for vertical farms' is being supported by Zero Carbon Farms. Vijja, who is studying at the University of Cambridge, is working under the supervision of Dr Ruchi Choudhary. He aims to design and build MACARONS – modular automated crop array online system. The system will be constructed in the OHMC and software developed to aid the optimisation of vertical farms through the use of machine learning and digital twins that integrate physics-based models with data.

Emlyn Williams

Emlyn is studying his PhD at the University of Lincoln, under the primary supervision of Dr Athanasios Polydoros. His project, titled 'Robot Learning of Harvesting Tasks from Humans’ Demonstrations', is being supported by Dogtooth Technologies. The project aims to increase the automation level of such tasks by reducing its cycle time and rise the harvesting success rate focusing on complex and challenging task variants. An intelligent robotic system will be developed which will be able to learn the harvesting task directly from human experts and autonomously adapt the acquired knowledge to novel scenarios.

Paul-David Zuercher

Paul-David is working with Dr Thomas Bohné at the University of Cambridge on his PhD project titled 'Low-cost interactive systems to optimise operator performance in the agri-food industry'. The project focuses on how immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality can be used to optimise large-scale up-skilling. The aim is to explore the potential and feasibility of largely automated solutions allowing faster, cheaper and more scientifically robust optimisation of large-scale up-skilling in industry.

Contact Us

If you have any comments, information or news you wish to share with the AgriFoRwArdS community, please do get in touch - We'd love to hear from you.

The AgriFoRwArdS CDT Delivery Team - agriforwards.cdt@lincoln.ac.uk

Visit us on the web at www.agriforwards-cdt.ac.uk and don’t forget to subscribe to the AgriFoRwArdS CDT YouTube channel, and follow us on LinkedIn.

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