On February 1st and 2nd, 2023, the European kick-off meeting for the AgriFoodTEF project was held in Povo (TN) at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, which will act as coordinator. The project received 60 million euros funding (50% from the European Union, the other half by the Member States) to be managed in five years. The large sum was allocated to test the effectiveness of the use of artificial intelligence and robotics in agriculture. Over 3 million euros will go to the Milan node of the consortium, represented by Prof. Matteo Matteucci of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano and by Prof. Davide Facchinetti of the University of Milan.
The AgrifoodTEF project was born to create a network of infrastructures capable of testing and validating artificial intelligence and robotics solutions used in the agri-food sector and to provide new services to manufacturing companies engaged in the agricultural mechanization sector. AgrifoodTEF will also offer certification, benchmarking and validation solutions not yet available on the market, for all those innovative applications which include artificial intelligence applied to agricultural machinery, robotics, remote sensing (also with drones), ultra-fast connectivity and automated analysis of images and data to the benefit of sustainability and traceability of agricultural products.
Robotics will be expected in the near future to make a great contribution to agricultural activities. Evidence can already be found in the zootechnical sector where milking robots are by now a rapidly spreading reality, but there are also many prototypes or innovative machines already marketed which are capable of carrying out, for example, selective mechanical weeding, or even chemical weeding with a strong limitation of herbicides only to areas where they are actually necessary, with undeniable advantages on the sustainability of production. There are also several robots intended for the harvesting of different types of fruit or vegetables, as well as those intended for tilling the soil or for phytosanitary treatments. By now these technologies are almost ready to be used even on a large scale, which would also lead to solving many problems connected both with the poor healthiness of certain jobs and with the now chronic lack of skilled labour.