INESC TEC’s Modular-E robot received the 2024 Agriculture Innovation Award, worth €10K. This Timac Agro initiative, which included the newspaper Expresso and SIC Notícias as media partners, aimed to promote an innovation award in the sector. The competition welcomed any research project in the agriculture sector with real application or concrete cases identified and documented. The award ceremony took place in Lisbon, on November 26.
This is not the first time that Modular-E, developed by one of INESC TEC’s laboratory infrastructures – the Laboratory of Robotics and IoT for Smart Precision Agriculture and Forestry (TRIBE LAB) – received an award. In April, the INESC TEC robot reached the second place in the category “Best World FIRA Robot”, within the scope of FIRA, the main international event in agricultural robotics and autonomous solutions.
But what does Modular-E do? “The robot will address vineyard tasks in a very precise way”, said Filipe Neves dos Santos, INESC TEC researcher and one of the three members of the team who attended the ceremony, together with André Aguiar and Luís Carlos Santos.
In fact, the INESC TEC robot – first created in 2018, improved with new features and tested in real-world scenarios, e.g., Novaterra (2020) and Vine&Wines (PRR Mobilising Agendas) – enables fertilisation, management of vegetation and precision spraying in hillside vineyards. “This solution aims to reduce operating costs, execute timely crop practices, and increase the flexibility of operations,” concluded Filipe Neves dos Santos.
Find out more about the other winners here.
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC.
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