Robotics in the vineyard

Owned by Mike Tango Bravo
Last updated: Feb 02, 2022
1 min read

Vineyards are most interesting for investigating precision agriculture and robotics for the following reasons:

  • High-value crop (for fine wines)

  • Labor-intensive crop (all year round there are tasks in the vineyard)

  • Grapes are a perennial crop, so systems can be refined over a longitudinal study

  • Potential mixture of permaculture in between rows (because of deep rootstocks, and isolated irrigation drips)

  • Vineyards (like Costaflores Organic Vineyard) often use a 4-wire trellis, which could be useful for different robotic integrations, data transfer, charging, distributed solar energy collection, etc.

Developing "Robotics for Microfarms" is the mandate of the ROMI-project.eu, lead by Jonathan Minchin.

The Openvino project is collaborating with the ROMI project to help is this endeavor.

Costaflores / Openvino is ideally suited as a development platform because:

  • This is a functioning, production, commercial vineyard.

  • Proper size: the grape production on the finca is <3Ha

  • Mendoza is a region where most tasks in the vineyard are still manual

  • Existing IoT sensor integrations

  • Existing and developing work log (How do you know which tasks to automate in the vineyard?)

  • Ideal physical layout: trellis, sensors, observation platform

  • LoRa and Wifi connectivity

  • Drone port

  • Blockchain and sidechain data registration

  • Costaflores is organic certified viticulture

  • Solar energy powered and conventional power available

  • Opposite seasons from Europe, allowing for two-season testing

  • Many available local technical resources

  • Excellent collaborative branding

To further this development, we are preparing an experimental vineyard at the FabLab Valldaura campus.