AgriFoRwArdS Newsletter Issue 13 - July 2023 Edition

Welcome to the 13th 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 Linked In to keep up to date with all the latest news and activities!

First Year PhD Conference – IfM Cambridge

Each year PhD students, who are part of the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) in Cambridge, take part in the first year PhD student conference. The event involves presentations from first-year PhD research students, keynote talks, a lunchtime poster session, and a panel session, which this year focused on sharing how recent developments in AI – such as chatGPT – are being used by research students to augment their PhD studies.

This year three of our Cohort 3 PhD students at Cambridge, Bethan Moncur, Paul Zuercher, and Garry Clawson, not only presented at the event, but also volunteered to lead the planning committee for the event.

AgriFoRwArdS Cohort 3 student Bethan Moncur, who is currently completing the first year of her PhD at Cambridge and is part of the committee said that:

I joined the committee because it is an opportunity to get involved with planning an academic event without the pressure of external guests. Plus, I thought it would be a great way to get to know other 1st year PhD students and lessen the load on the existing committee members by splitting the tasks over more people.

The IfM host a series of special ‘Research Development’ sessions for students which assist in developing their presentation skills, which they then put to use during the conference, each presenting for 10 minutes.

This is a key milestone in the first year PhD journey as a few months later, at the end of August, the first year PhD report is required. The IfM PhD conference helps students organise their thoughts about the progress they have made and identify any gaps in their learning so far. It also allows feedback on progress so far and gives students an idea of what the first year report review and viva is like.

Read more about the conference on the student blog, https://agriforwards-students.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2023/05/17/first-year-phd-conference-ifm-cambridge/ 

Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) Conference

Amie Owen attended the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) at the London Excel Centre. Although Amie wasn't presenting this time, attending the conference (which is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems) gave the opportunity to network with some of the most influential researchers in the sector.

Here is what Amie had to say about the event;

It was a fantastic opportunity to attend AAMAS in London in May this year. I am at a stage in my research where I am considering which Agent-based techniques to apply to the design of a software system. Being amongst other researchers in this field gave me a strong sense of what the trends are, what other researchers are excited about, and what potential pit falls or limitations are. I particularly enjoyed the MABS (Multi-Agent Based Simulation) Invited Speaker’s talk “Combining Constraint-Based and Imperative Programming in MABS” given by Bruce Edmonds. His passion for improving understandability and integrity of computer models was very inspiring.

Trials in the field for CDT Student Will Rohde

In May Cohort 2 AgriFoRwArdS Student Will Rohde began a 4-5 month trial on variable rate application (VRA) of nitrogen with Industry Partner G's Growers. This involves weekly image data collection, data processing, and fertiliser application.

The trial is a truly collaborative effort, with team members from G's providing access to crops, advice on where to locate the trial, base fertiliser rates, a modified version of their sampling app, and doing the weekly data acquisition. Will then processes the data, uses a control rule to generate the VRA nitrogen inputs, and visits the farm weekly to apply the fertiliser to the plants in the field.

The main aim of this trial is to asses whether the use of a control rule based on consensus reduces the variance in the controlled plants. For iceberg lettuce the uniformity of a crop is closely related to yield, and a decrease in variance would mean an increase in yield.

CDT Students take part in UKRAS Robot Lab Live for third year in a row

In June Cohort 3 students, Alex Elias and Samuel Carter, teamed up with other members of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS) group, including CDT Director Prof Marc Hanheide, to take part in the UKRAS Robot Lab Live event. The event, which features robotic demonstrations from leading robotics laboratories across the UK, is run by UKRAS as part of the annual UK Festival of Robotics, a 7 day celebration of robotics, aimed at increasing public engagement with robotics and intelligent systems.

The Lincoln team focused their live demonstration on a 'day out at the museum with robots'. You can watch the demonstration on YouTube, here.

UEA hold their annual Postgraduate Day

Each year, the University of East Anglia hold a postgraduate day, where postgraduate students present their work to fellow students and colleagues. The students are split into two groups, early stage PhD (year 1) and late stage PhD (year 2+), each presenting either a poster or oral presentation.

Mazvydas Gudelis won the coveted Best Poster award for the late stage category, for his poster titled 'Deep Learning for Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba) morphology analysis from high resolution image pairs'.

At the same event, Cohort 3 student James Bennett won runner up for the best poster in the early stage category! Harry Rogers also presented his research to his peers.

Other student achievements and activities

Roopika Ravikanna visited the University of Birmingham for a week in March of this year to work closely with the School of Computer Science Team there. During the visit Roopika and the Birmingham team investigated proactive multi-robot task allocation methods in agricultural environments, this was a fantastic opportunity for cross institutional research.

Bethan Moncur is going to be presenting at the 25th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2023), which is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark 23rd to 28th July 2023.

As well as taking part in the UEA annual Postgratuate Day (see 'UEA hold their annual Postgraduate Day') Mazvydas Gudelis took part, and won third place, in the PyTorch Docathon 2023. The event, run by Meta, took place over 16 days with 110 teams working with the neural network library PyTorch.

Andy Perrett had an article published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The paper, titled 'DeepVerge: Classification of Roadside Verge Biodiversity and Conservation Potential' focuses on the topic of Andy's MSc and PhD projects with the CDT.

Willow Mandil recently completed an internship at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, focusing on reinforcement learning, manipulation, and language models.

Xumin Gao recently wrote an article titled 'Artificial Intelligence and Aphid Counting' (full article on page 30) which was published in BBRO's Beet Review. The article discusses aphids, which are considered an agricultural pest, and the process of using machine learning to count them to allow for effective pest control.

Harry Rogers has a couple of publications and conference presentations coming up, including presenting 'An Agricultural Precision Sprayer Deposit Identification System' at CASE 2023 in August. Harry has also been taking part in some exciting outreach activities, including speaking to students at various colleges and schools.

In the last newsletter, we wrote about the Lincoln team attending the Fresh Produce Consortium event in Peterborough. Also there was Alex Elias, find out more about his experience on the Student Blog.

Jack Foster has been offered a place on the Alan Turing Institute Enrichment Scheme, which starts in October. Jack will be working from their lab in London a few days a week and collaborating with their researcher network for 9 months!

The CDT Team are so proud of all of our incredible students, and the wonderful activities they are taking part in, the above is just a snapshot of all the exciting things going on in the AgriFoRwArdS CDT. Well done everyone!

Students meet in Norwich for July 2023's PhD Progress Meeting

On the 11th July the AgriFoRwArdS students travelled to Norwich to convene at the University of East Anglia for the July 2023 Quarterly PhD Progress Meeting.

Students from the University of East Anglia, and the UEA CDT Team, hosted the event, which saw presentations from the other PhD students (from Cambridge and Lincoln).

The progress meeting is always a fantastic opportunity for students to practice their presentation skills in a safe and supportive environment, gaining valuable feedback and insight from their peers. This time in particular, as students were asked to present PechaKucha (a storytelling format in which a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each). Although challenging to embrace a new presenting style, it was a great chance for students to develop a new skill alongside their fellow students.

Thank you to the UEA team for hosting such a valuable day.

AgriFoRwArdS visit ICRA 2023

This year the biggest robotics conference in the world, ICRA, was held in London, UK. This gave the AgriFoRwArdS team and students a fantastic opportunity to get involved, without needing to trek across the world!

AgriFoRwArdS was involved in various aspects of the conference, from hosting one of the competitions, presenting, and taking part in competitions and workshops.

PUB.R Competition Organisation

Staff from the University of Lincoln and University of Cambridge came together to host one of the exciting competition challenges featured at ICRA. These competitions serve as an excellent platform for demonstrating the efforts of teams from across the world to solve a common challenge. They promote discussions and exchange of knowledge, enrich research, and motivate researchers to push boundaries.

Teams were invited to test the design and control of their robots in the Preparation and dish Up of an English Breakfast with Robots (PUB.R) competition. The competition showcased the latest advancements in food handling and preparation, by challenging traditional robotics domains, including navigation, manipulation, and scene understanding, but also proposing novel scientific challenges, such as robotic food tasting, communication, creativity, and art.

The spectacle and excitement provided by the competitions helped draw the interest of new and budding researchers, which made it a fantastic outreach opportunity for AgriFoRwArdS, who sponsored the competition.

You can read more about this, and the other compeitions featured, here https://mlcontests.com/icra-2023/#cooking-breakfast

PUB.R participation

AgriFoRwArdS Students from the University of Cambridge entered the competition, which they began working on during the AgriFoRwArdS Spring School (you can read more about this in the April Edition of the newsletter).

Grzegorz Sochacki, Vijja Wichitwechkarn, Jack Foster, Will Rohde, and Elijah Almanzor (with support from CDT Technician Narges Khadem Hosseini) travelled to London to take part in the competition, working on three different scenarios, shopping, cooking and serving. Each scenario presented different challenges and focused on different research aspects, all integrated in the single overarching goal.

The team worked together brilliantly and were ranked third overall!

Here is what the students had to say...

The competition itself was rather challenging, while each subtask was solvable it was a significant challenge integrating the wide range of equipment and codebases that we had. Nevertheless, it was a nice change of pace to work on a self-contained problem, rather than the open-endedness of a PhD. We achieved third place in the competition, behind EPFL from Switzerland, and Tsinghua University from China.

Presentation

Cohort 1 Lincoln student, Karoline Heiwolt, also made the trip to London to visit ICRA 2023. Karoline was invited to present her poster 'Statistical shape representations for temporal registration of plan components in 3D'.

It was an absolute honour to be included in such a fantastic conference programme. I was particularly thrilled to meet so many new and familiar faces, colleagues and friends, who share my enthusiasm for robotics. As always, a massive thanks goes to my advisors and co-authors Grzegorz Cielniak and Cengiz Öztireli for their continuous support.

To learn more about Karoline's research, watch the short video presentation summarising the key aspects of the research and the full paper below:

AgriFoRwArdS CDT and Joint Robotics CDT Conferences meet TAROS'23

We are pleased to confirm that the AgriFoRwArdS CDT Conference 2023 will be happening on 13-15 September 2023, at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.

This year we are joining our efforts with the Joint Robotics CDT Conference and TAROS’23. The conference aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and industry members from the fields of Robotics and AI to exchange and share their expertise and research results with emphasis on current developments in those areas of research.

TAROS is the longest-running UK-hosted international conference on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), which is aimed at the presentation and discussion of the latest results and methods in autonomous robotics research and applications.

TAROS offers a friendly environment for robotics researchers and industry to take stock and plan future progress. It welcomes senior researchers and research students alike and specifically provides opportunities for research students and young research scientists to present their work to the scientific community.

TAROS conference aims blend well with the aims of AgriFoRwArdS CDT and Joint Robotics conferences that nurture and promote student research potential. We are delighted to offer yet another opportunity to Robotics CDTs students to meet and receive advice from leading academics and industry practitioners.

Plenary Speakers:

• Dr Amanda Prorok, University of Cambridge
• Prof Sethu Vijayakumar, University of Edinburgh
• Dr Jamie Shotton, Wayve
• Dr Gert Kootstra, Wageningen University

We are looking forward to seeing you all in Cambridge, in September!

• When: 13-15 September 2023
• Where: Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, Trumpington St, CB2 1PZ
• Conference Website: https://taros-conference.org/

Dr Edwin Ren

Associate Professor Dr Edwin Ren’s work is project-driven. Being an active researcher for 10 years, Edwin has been involved in more than 10 projects regarding cutting-edge technologies---4G/5G mobile networks and security, AI/ML, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, Edwin is an expert in 4G/5G edge/cloud computing and his team is implementing a 4G/5G testbed in the UEA campus. Calvin John, who will be starting his PhD at UEA in October, will be supervised by Edwin, the project team will be working on a GPS/RTK Localization-based Agri-Robot for Precision Agri-tasks in Crop Fields.

Edwin’s research work is project-driven, and the main thrust of his work is developing efficient and enabling solutions for real IoT system problems of the projects cooperating with industry companies (MediaTek Inc., Inventec Co., Chunghwa Telecom Co., and Jack Sewing Machine Co., etc.).

Dr Somenath Bakshi

Dr Somenath Bakshi is a Lecturer in Synthetic Biology at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He will be supervising his first AgriFoRwArdS CDT student – Jack Bradley - in October, the PhD project will open interesting collaboration possibilities in academia as well as in industry.

Somenath did his PhD in University of Wisconsin Madison under Professor James Weisshaar – developing super-resolution imaging technologies to study central cellular processes in microbes. After finishing his PhD, he moved to Harvard University for his postdoc with Professor Johan Paulsson.

During his postdoc Somenath developed high-throughput timelapse imaging technologies of single microbes in controlled complex growth-conditions. Though most of his work has focused on developing methods and approaches to synthetic biology, he remains interested in quantifying the dynamics and control of natural circuits.

His research interests include;

• Engineering and characterising genetic control circuits in bacteria
• Engineering and characterising therapeutic phage viruses
• Single-cell analysis of phage infection kinetics in bacteria
• Single cell analysis of antibiotic persistence and collective tolerance
• Developing quantitative methods for microbiology: Microscopy, Microfluidics, and Machine-learning

If you interested in further collaboration with Somenath, please visit his research group's website.

Samuel tells about his experiences of working with Industry

Samuel Carter is currently in his first year of his PhD study at the University of Lincoln. His PhD project, 'Learning robot navigation and manipulation from demonstrations' focuses on robotising cleaning machines in poultry sheds. 2 Sisters Food Group are collaborating with Samuel, and his PhD Supervisor, Amir Ghalamzan Esfahani, on this project. As part of this collaboration Samuel has had the opportunity to travel to various farms and factories across the country to observe the processes they currently follow, which will allow him to learn about their current challenges.

Although my project is only for a small process in the industry, the experience of going to the different sites and understanding the different components of the industry has really helped me understand the bigger picture in what I’m contributing to.

Each student has an Industry Advisor as a member of their supervisory team who helps support the student and project from an Industry perspective. Samuel's advisor Andrew is very passionate about the industry and is eager to implement the project which Samuel is working towards. This really is an example of student, supervisor and industry working together to benefit each other and the sector!

The staff are all very knowledgeable about their trade and it’s fascinating to hear the different opinions for how technology could be implemented. As well as the possible challenges I would face as I go about doing so.

The James Dyson Foundation continue to support Agri-Robotics

The James Dyson Foundation provides scholarships to support the tuition fees of PhD students at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge who are researching Agri-Robotics – the Alec Dyson Scholarship. The scholars are researching how robotics can advance agricultural practices. The scholars’ tuition fees are supported over a period of three years whilst they complete their PhD.

Currently, this scholarship supports three AgriFoRwArdS PhD students: Haihui Yan, who is researching robotics soft fruit harvesting; Jack Foster, who is researching the digitalisation of environmental and crop-related data; Garry Clawson, who is researching the application of robotics to create a nutrition management tool.

You can read more about the student's visit to Dyson on the Student Blog.

CDT Supervisors support students at ICRA 2023

Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) PhD Student Rajitha de Silva submitted a paper to the TIG-IV workshop at ICRA 2023, which was co-authored by CDT Supervisors Dr Grzegorz Cielniak and Dr Junfeng Gao. The paper, titled 'Leaving the Lines Behind: Vision-Based Crop Row Exit for Agricultural Robot Navigation' won the Best Paper Award at the end, showing just how on topic agri-robotics really is!

Find out about the other research ongoing within the agri-food technology sector at Lincoln - https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/liat/research/roboticsandautomation/

Let us know if you have any interesting research, publications, or outreach opportunities to share, email agriforwards.cdt@lincoln.ac.uk!

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.