The STAR Project: Giving Smell Sense to Agricultural Robotics

The ability to single out mature fruits and to selectively start the harvesting is critical for precision farming. This paper presents the latest research efforts within the STAR project funded by the 2022 Joint call of the ICT-AGRI-FOOD action. STAR aims to develop a unifying framework to combine different sensor modalities that include standard (e.g., RGB-D cameras) with novel sensors (e.g., gas sensors), and methods for creating accurate maps to facilitate operations on a narrow scale with a smaller environment footprint to make relevant information easily visible to the farmer. The framework is demonstrated in the field through the integration onboard of a farmer robot that closely monitors vineyards in Italy.