"AGROBOOST" is a 5-year, multi-disciplinary project aiming to transform agriculture through advanced agro-robotics, AR, AI, automation, and digitalisation. It seeks to enhance safety, appeal, productivity, and reduce environmental impacts and labour shortages, particularly benefiting women, young professionals, and farmers with mobility challenges.
Six pilot campaigns across Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, England, Belgium, Switzerland) will cover diverse agricultural practices, including tree pruning, mushroom harvesting, automated weeding, strawberry picking, animal husbandry, and steep slope viticulture monitoring. The project engages a diverse range of stakeholders, such as farmers (young and women), farmworkers, advisors, technology providers, and scientists in decision-making processes, and incorporates social sciences perspectives.
FiBL leads Work Package 2, focusing on socio-economic methodologies to improve agricultural working conditions by understanding the existing challenges of working conditions and labour shortages in agriculture and what it means to address those with robotic solutions. FiBL also collaborates with EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and farmers in a pilot in the Lavaux region to develop and test lightweight robots able to work in steep and terraced vineyards for mowing and potentially performing weeding and soil aeration tasks. The goal is to reduce work penibility and exposure to pesticides for workers.
Project partner
