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AIWeeder will help farmers address one of the oldest problems of agriculture – fighting #weeds. It is a fully autonomous weeding robot, based on a #lightweight, 4-wheeled #electric engines rover, powered by #solar energy for 24/7 working cycle.

The robot uses cameras and various positional sensors combined with #ArtificialIntelligence to spot the weeds and self-navigate in and round the fields. It uses several contact and contactless methods to destroy weeds effectively and efficiently.

This project is leaded by the company SMARTFARM ROBOTICS, their role in the project will be the overall management of the project, pepare the testing environment, the field testing of the robot, collection of feedback and the improvement of the technology.

In the project the company GTR Solutions will also participate testing the prototype, providing feedback from testing and giving inputs for the improvement of the technology. /

The main ouputs of the project will be:

1. The robot will need to demonstrate a minimum of 4 hours of autonomous uninterrupted work in daytime and 4 hrs of work during night-time, without more than 1 technical emergency stop in either.
2. Starting in a test plot with small weeds (less than 3 cm height and 10 cm2 leaf area), a weeding robot run by either contact or non-contact methods will result in no higher or larger weeds being present in the plot 5 days after the treatment. Verification will be based on tagging of pictures taken before and 5 days after the treatment.
3. The AI image recognition should result in the following performance – recall rate for target plant of 0.9 (at recognition score cut-off of 0.5) and weed recall rate of 0.95 (at recognition score cut-off 0.75).
4. It will need to be able to self-navigate autonomously in the rows of cultivated plants without need of human steering or any other outside support.
5. All systems should operate with solar power only, measured by the level of ending battery charge being lower than the starting one for the daytime work, and for battery charge consumed during night-time work to be not more than 20% above the measured daytime energy consumption

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