The agricultural sector is facing numerous economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, as well as a growing labour shortage, due in part to the depopulation of rural areas. The reliable detection, accurate identification, and adequate quantification of pathogens and other factors affecting plant and animal health must also be kept under control in order to reduce economic expenses, trade disruptions, and even risks to human health.
The AFarCloud project will provide a distributed platform for autonomous agriculture that will allow for the real-time integration and cooperation of physical computer systems, in order to improve efficiency, productivity, animal health, and food quality, while at the same time reducing agricultural labour costs. This platform will be integrated with the business management software, and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real-time data mining techniques.
E.S.T.E. srl is an integral part of the project, together with companies scattered throughout Europe.
Accessible agricultural robots
The AFarCloud project also aims to make agricultural robots accessible to a greater number of users, allowing agricultural vehicles to operate within a cooperative network, thus opening up the doors to new applications and ensuring re-usability, as the capabilities of different standard vehicles are able to be combined to increase farmers’ incomes and reduce labour costs.
The results of the AFarCloud project will be demonstrated by 3 holistic demonstrators (Finland, Spain and Italy), complete with livestock farming and management scenarios, and 8 local demonstrators (Latvia, Sweden, Spain and Czech Republic), in order to test specific functions and validate the project’s results in relevant environments located within various European regions. E.S.T.E. srl is an integral part of the project, together with companies scattered throughout Europe.
Aggregate farming in the cloud
The results of the AFarCloud project will strengthen the partners’ market positions by improving their capacity for innovation and responding to industrial needs at both the European and international levels. The consortium represents the entire value chain of ICT-based agricultural solutions, including all the key players necessary for the development, demonstration and future market deployment of the project’s precision agriculture framework.
