The ROMI platform: a helping hand to farming communities

<p><strong>The following video describes the ROMI platform and explains how the set of tools can be adapted to different farming contexts. Funded by EU Grant 773875.</strong></p> <p><em>Videos are available in:</em></p> <ul> <li>Hi-res (1080p Apple ProRes)</li> <li>Mid-res&nbsp;(1080p&nbsp;H265)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Video script:</strong></p> <p>(MINCHIN) ROMI is robotics for micro-farms. It consists of a platform of robotic tools that can be customised, adapted to local situations. So understanding that these tools can be used in different ways is absolutely crucial to the project.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) We try to work on a number of tools that are open hardware, like the cable bot like the rover like the plant imager these are bricks that can be reused in different contexts different types of farms and that gradually what we want to build upon.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) Over four years of development and testing we&#39;ve developed a platform of tools that can work together and that really goes from the ground-based rover which has got an ability to move around a plant and move to a plant in a field. We have above that a cable system, a cable bot which can be strung in a greenhouse situation or along a polyculture farm such as this one. We are using drones to be able to have an overall vision of the landscape and changes within the environment finally there&#39;s a phenotyping robot which is able to scan in detail a plant in a laboratory to help biologists or plant development biologists understand and map growth. These come together in what we&#39;re calling the farmers dashboard which allows somebody in situ to understand what they&#39;re seeing understand and analyse things which they can&#39;t see, and also provide data and data sets back into a laboratory or a computational situation to try and track and understand a complexity in much more depth, than has ever been able to be done before.<br> <br> (BAORI) Agricultural equipment in general you&#39;re looking at a hundred thousand pounds hundred thousand euros you name your your kind of uh your range but you&#39;re not accessible to someone who&#39;s got a very small farm okay so you&#39;re looking at a lot of money um the rover at the moment costs approximately seven to eight thousand euros to build. Now as a piece of industrial equipment, agricultural equipment that&#39;s that&#39;s very very cheap. We do have a very simple web interface that you can run on your phone to connect to the robot to tell it; I want a hoe for the next 25 meters, I want to do weeding. We use a playstation controller actually for just driving the rover around the field and this is something that anybody can learn to use very very quickly. We&#39;re kind of targeting somebody with very minimal technical knowledge so although you can build this and if you&#39;re a maker you can change the code you can change it to do what you want. We kind of envisage a situation where actually people will just download a complete package put it onto an Arduino, put it onto the raspberry pi. In fact that will install everything and then you&#39;re ready to go.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) The rover we intend to be the sort of most practical device, we&#39;ve specialised it for weeding which is something for which there is a demand today.<br> <br> (OKADA) Our enemies i would say are the weeds as you can see and in summer it&#39;s terrible.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) One of the crucial demonstrators of the ROMI project is the weeding tool. Farmers dealing with complexity of a number of crops spend at least twenty percent of their time weeding. When we are able to weed mechanically this means that we don&#39;t use herbicides. And so weeding mechanically affords us a more organic way of agriculture and in this way the the weeding tool developed by ROMI is a demonstrator of what could be done to support some of these farmers dealing with a labor-intensive complexity on their farm. but the software the programming and the drivers of that sort of computation don&#39;t stop at weeding and we are able to go beyond mechanically into a whole potential of solutions.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) We would like to get them, these tools, in the field as soon as possible so that we can work with farmers and have their feedback but at the same time try to build a community around it, multi-disciplinary of farmers, engineers, researchers to improve these tools, augment their possibilities and then we&#39;ll see how far we get.<br> <br> (BESNARD) the ROMI project is interested in getting important information from the plant architecture and from the plant growth process it&#39;s very important for a farmer to get this information just to detect very early on if possible any deviations from the normal curves, if you have a pathogen attack for example you just notice very early sign of stress in your plants, and that&#39;s generally the pathogen is not like everywhere so it&#39;s much easier to to counter attack especially like in organic farming when you know like a lot of chemicals to do it. And at the same time we are developing a tool a technology to get as much information as we can from plant architecture and this has an application towards farmers to just monitor the growth of their crops. But this can have also another application for basic scientists like me just to understand the basic process of our plant built its own architecture which is a basic question.</p>