FP7 Project VINBOT – 6th General Meeting in Logroño, Spain
1. Introduction
Between the 28th and the 29th of July 2016, ASSIST Team attended to the 6th General Meeting of the partners of the European FP7 project VINBOT (Autonomous Cloud-computing Vineyard Robot to Optimise Yield Management and Wine Quality). The meeting was hosted by our Spanish partner PROVIR.
VINBOT is an all-terrain autonomous mobile robot with a set of sensors capable of capturing and analyzing vineyard images and 3D data by means of cloud computing applications, to determine the yield of vineyards and to share information with the winegrowers.
VINBOT responds to a need to boost the quality of European wines by implementing precision viticulture (PV) to estimate the yield (amount of fruit per square meter of vine area: kg/m2). Wineries and winegrowers will be able to make accurate yield predictions to organize the production and marketing their wines, coordinating the mixing of grapes of homogeneous quality to efficiently market a range of wines by quality and price.
The main target of this meeting was for Robotnik to demonstrate the functionality of the robot, train SMEs and SME - AGs to use the robot, to configure and prepare the hardware and software under certain circumstances. A second objective of the meeting was to decide future plans for the project.
The first meeting day, started on July 28th, at a local venue outside Logroño - “Bodegas Juan Carlos Sancha”. The first part of the day started with an overview of the current project status and a training plan with materials.
The second part of the day was dedicated to the training session for all partners, based on preparations made one day before the meeting by Robotnik (Robotnik is an SME specialized in robotics product development and R&D and engineering services in Robotics) and ISA (The Instituto Superior de Agronomia, oldest and most qualified school of graduate and postgraduate degrees in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, in Portugal). All partners have learned how to control the robot, how to program it to scan the vineyard, how to charge it and update the software.
The second day was hosted at Centro Cultural Ibercaja in Logroño where were discussed the project's financial and reporting issues, dissemination, exploitation, and IPR.
We also had the pleasure to taste the amazing wines of that area, production of Bodegas Juan Carlos Sancha, and understand why that area is the warm house of so many wine varieties.
The VINBOT project is co-funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme managed by REA-Research Executive Agency and submitted under FP7-SME - Specific Programme "Capacities": Research for the benefit of SMEs, on-topic SME-2013-2 - Research for SME Associations, with the project ID: 605630. In this program are involved 5 countries from Europe: Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Italy, and Romania represented by our company - ASSIST Software.
Read more about our EU projects in Romania.
