Follow our journey
Project Air
With the support of UKRI's Transforming Food Production and Defra in Farming Innovation Pathways (FIP). Project no.10004402
Project Description:
Farming of crops, horticulture and cereals has seen unprecedented challenges, with sustainability issues, workforce shortages and tightening financial constraints exacerbated by COVID-19 and Brexit. There is a growing need to find alternative transformative solutions.
The proposed fully-autonomous machinery offers the potential to ease the burden of crop-scouting on time-poor growers and allow for improved use of resources at an affordable price.
During this 12-month project, the team will develop an autonomous platform to integrate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), offering capacities such as auto-calibration of cameras, auto-docking and auto-charging of the UAV. The system will be tested and demonstrated on a farm.
Current status: Complete
Meet the funders
Farming Innovation Pathways
January 2022
Our first visit to Deepdale to test our drone and the prototype of the landing dock on our robot platform specialised for agricultural robotics, joined by our collaborators at Loughborough University.
We are thrilled to have been featured in the Eastern Daily Press by Chris Hill talking about our progress so far and plans for future development.
You can read the article here.