Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production
The work “Contrastive Instance Association for 4D Panoptic Segmentation” by Rodrigo Marcuzzi et al. wins the 4D LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation Challenge of the 6th ICCV Workshop on Benchmarking Multi-Target Tracking. The challenge was based on the SemanticKITTI dataset, which is densely labeled in the spatial and temporal domain. The task was to assign a semantic and unique instance label to every 3D LiDAR point.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) is establishing a new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC). In the CRC 1502 “Regional Climate Change: The Role of Land Use and Water Management”, researchers are investigating the hypothesis that human-induced land use change and intensified water management also influence regional climate – leading to unintended changes in the natural regional water and energy cycle.
To investigate this hypothesis further, researchers from a wide range of disciplines come together – including hydrology, meteorology, geodesy, earth system modeling, remote sensing, agricultural economics and social sciences. Together, they aim to develop a model system that will be able to map, in particular, those human-climate interactions associated with changes in the continental hydrological cycle.
The new innovative research project will receive its funding of almost 10 million euros from January 1, 2022 for an initial period of four years. More than 20 PhenoRob members from a wide range of scientific fields are involved in the project. Speaker of the Program is Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kusche. Co-speakers are Prof. Dr. Silke Hüttel and Prof. Dr. Harry Vereecken. The project has strong overlaps with the thematic areas of PhenoRob and is also a partner project of PhenoRob.
Further Information:
https://www.lf.uni-bonn.de/en/faculty/news/press-releases/neuer-sfb-1502-regionaler-klimawandel
https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/299-2021?set_language=en
The new international ranking “Highly Cited Researchers 2021” shows which researchers were cited most often from 2010 to 2020 and are among the world’s most influential one percent of their field. In the list of the ten most cited researchers at the University of Bonn are the three PhenoRob members Wulf Amelung, Frank Ewert and Matin Qaim.
Further Information:
https://recognition.webofscience.com/awards/highly-cited/2021/
The International Conference on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production (DIGICROP) will take place as a remote event on March 28-30, 2022.
We are seeking qualified presenters that engage the scientific audience on the topic of “Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production” with our Call for Presentations.
The entire event is free of charge for all participants and presenters.
DIGICROP 2022 is a scientific event addressing an international and interdisciplinary audience working at the intersection of engineering, robotics, computer science, crop sciences, agricultural sciences, phenotyping, and economics. It brings together researchers across disciplines that develop, propose, use, or evaluate new digital technologies with the goal of making central contributions to sustainability in the context of crop production, crop breeding, biodiversity, or our ecosystems.
DIGICROP 2022 will offer a mix of keynote presentations, invited video talks, and submitted video talks. The aim of the conference is to stimulate scientific discussions among the participants. The conference takes place online, consisting of pre-recorded video talks and live Q&A sessions.
DIGICROP 2022 is jointly hosted and organized by the German Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” at the University of Bonn and the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS).
For further information please visit our conference website: https://www.digicrop.de
Should you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via digicrop2022@nullphenorob.de!
On her NRW research trip, Science Minister Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen visited the University of Bonn on Friday. On the Klein-Altendorf campus, she visited the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence.
After an introduction to the collaborative research of the Faculty of Agriculture the Minister visited the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob, the only agricultural science cluster of excellence in Germany. The two cluster spokespersons, Prof. Dr. Heiner Kuhlmann and Prof. Dr. Cyrill Stachniss, gave an insight into the joint research between the University of Bonn and the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
During the presentation of two drones and a PhenoRob robot, it became clear that the importance of digitalisation in agribusiness will continue to grow rapidly in the future. With the help of the devices, researchers can systematically record various parameters and study the effects of changes on plant growth.
The Pressrelease is available here (german)
We are happy to announce that the work of PhenoRob PI Gabriel Schaaf and PhD candidate Esther Riemer was published in Molecular Plant (IF 2020: 12.0). This groundbreaking study of PhenoRob’s researchers together with colleagues of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben identifies previously unknown mechanisms of plants used to monitor their phosphate reserves, which plays an essential role for all living organisms.
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!
In their monthly podcast, querFeldein.blog is talking with experts from science, politics and practice about their ideas for the agriculture of the future. In their latest episode, Cyrill Stachniss is their guest on the future of robotics in agriculture. They are discussion questions on what role robotics will play in arable farming, or if drones together with autonomous machines will replace the work of humans in the fields.
As part of her visit to the University of Bonn, PhenoRob had the chance to present its research to the German Minister of Research and Education, Anja Karliczek, along with the other five Clusters of Excellence at the University of Bonn. At the university’s Nutzpflanzengarten at Campus Popppelsdorf, PhenoRob, led by spokespersons Heiner Kuhlmann and Cyrill Stachniss, had the chance to demonstrate our UAVs and experimental robots for monitoring and targeted weed control in crop production. Karliczek was especially impressed by the technology the core projects brought along: CP4’s robot, usually used in PhenoRob’s central experiment at Campus Klein-Altendorf, additionally to two drones. “I am very happy that the important topic of sustainable agriculture is part of the funding within the German Excellence Strategy,” says Karliczek.
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.
