News

The new PhenoRob Movie premiered during the kick-off of the International Summer School on Agricultural Robotics in front of a large international audience. Thanks to all our PhD students who appear in the movie and to all who helped to make it a great success. Watch the movie now and learn what PhenoRob is all about!

PhenoRob’s Call for Applications for the International Summer School travelled the world. At the end of the deadline on June 15, we had received 100 applications from 30 countries. This is a remarkable success.

From Canada to Japan, Peru to Nepal, Finland to South Africa people are interested in Agricultural Robotics and so applied to attend the 5 day event, taking part online from August 24-28. Besides interesting workshops on the topic of Agricultural Robotics, there will be networking sessions and socializing events. People from all over the world will get together to exchange ideas on the topic, to interact and to make PhenoRob globally known. We are excited to see the international community of PhenoRob growing.

In April the global news agency Reuters published their list of the world’s 1000 most influential climate scientists. Frank Ewert is among the top 100.

The framework for identifying the most influential climate researchers goes back to an idea of the data journalist Maurice Tamman who created a list using a combination of three rankings. These are based on the number of publications on topics related to climate change, the number of their citations and the attention the researchers and their work have received in public policy papers, the lay press and through social media. Frank Ewert is one of the world’s top 100 climate influencers and among the top 10 in Germany.

Reuters Hot List

Agricultural production of crops as a source of food and energy faces enormous challenges: on the one hand, yields must be increased to meet the needs of a growing global population, on the other hand, the available arable land is shrinking, the effects of climate change are already noticeable in many places, and the ecological footprint of crop production must be reduced. Digital technologies such as agrorobotics in particular have the potential to make a significant contribution to overcoming these challenges through optimized observation, analysis and intervention.

The deadline for applications is June 15, 2021.

The PhenoRob Excellentcluster of the University of Bonn is inviting applications for the PhenoRob International Summer School 2021 on “Agricultural Robotics”, which will take place from Tue. 24 to Sat. 28 August, 2021 as a digital event.  Advanced master students and early doctoral students (first year) are invited to apply. The summer school will be held in English.

Please see the call for applications for further information on the event, the terms of participation, and information on the application process on:

https://agrirobotics.wordpress.com/

PhenoRob partner project “WeedAI” receives funding from BMEL for 3 years.

The importance of novel methods for weed control is rapidly growing, however, evaluating the effectiveness of these technologies is lacking. “Weed AI” is working on methods to rapidly and autonomously evaluate the efficacy of weeding systems. Based on core deep learning (AI) methods for plant recognition, this project will develop vision-based methods to automatically assess the effectiveness of weeding operations (both weed and crop). Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL), it is hoped that this project will contribute to assessing new weeding technologies and improve uptake of these new technologies.

260.000 Euros for PhenoRob Partner Project from the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture

Globalization does not only mean more mobility for humans, but also – unfortunately – for pests and parasites. One of these new plant diseases in Germany is “Flavescence dorée”, a phytoplasma disease of the vine that has become a growing threat for our vineyards here. To battle this, the project “PhytoMo” sets out to identify diseased vines early on, using a multispectral image processing system. These can be used on the ground, but also in the air. At the University of Bonn, the project is led by Prof. Dr. Heiner Kuhlmann and Dr. Lasse Klingbeil and has been recognized as a Partner Project of Core Project 1 “4D Crop Reconstruction” in the Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob”.

“In this project, we will watch the vines closely to detect this disease early on,” says Klingbeil. “We will use sensors to observe them in great detail and this is where ‘PhytoMo’ fits in with the research conducted in PhenoRob.” The project is a collaborative effort of the Julius Kühn-Institut, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB), University of Bonn, RLP AgroScience GmbH, LOGXON Gmbh & Co. KG and the State Education and Research Institute for Viticulture and Pomology Weinsberg. It is part of the Federal Ministry’s initiative to combat introduction and importation of regulated and new organisms harmful to plants.