Robotics in the vineyard
- Mike Tango Bravo
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.